FReeper Book Club: Atlas Shrugged, Atlantis

Dagny awakens to the face of John Galt! He is surprised that Dagny braved his cloaking device to reach the valley. It is too painful for her to walk, so John picks her up and carries her. She hears the strains of Halley’s Fifth Concerto, played by the composer himself, coming from his house. She spots a three-foot statue of a dollar sign cast out of solid gold seated on a stone column – Francisco’s private joke, says John.

A car arrives, driven by Midas Mulligan, with Hugh Akston as his passenger. Akston is stunned by her arrival, having previously told her that she would never find the designer of the motor and now finding her in his arms. Mulligan profanely gives her a rich tongue lashing for having endangered her life by crashing into the valley rather than entering by the front door; he is flummoxed by the arrival of the first “scab”. John takes responsibility for Dagny and thanks her for hiring Quentin Daniels.

As they drive along, Dagny finds that Mulligan owns the valley, John works there, and Akston is one of John’s two “fathers”. The final penny drops. John Galt was the mysterious third student of Akston and Stadler, the second assistant bookkeeper, the designer of the motor – and The Destroyer.

At his house, John admits he has been watching her for years. The famous Dr. Hendricks, who had disappeared six years before, tends to Dagny’s injuries. As John cooks and serves breakfast, Dagny finds that Lawrence Hammond runs a grocery store, Dwight Sanders a pig farm, and Judge Narragansett a dairy farm. John Galt is merely the handyman. Dagny realizes that John’s motor is the power source for the valley and badly desires to see it in action. But she is astonished that Mulligan is charging John twenty-five cents to rent his car; she quickly learns that the word “give” is banned in the valley.

Quentin Daniels delivers the car. He apologizes to Dagny for skipping out without notice and tells her how John had come to his lab, erased his work and written down one simple equation. After that, he would have happily followed John Galt to the ends of the earth. With pride, he tells her that he is now a janitor and hopes to rise to the position of electrician!

The first stop on the grand tour is Dwight Sanders, who agrees to fix her plane for a mere $200 – in gold. But she can’t buy the gold, and all her cash and stock is worthless in the valley.

The second stop is Dick McNamara, the former rail contractor, who is in charge of the valley’s utilities. He now has three helpers: a former professor of economics who taught that one can’t produce more than one consumes, a former professor of history who taught that the poor of the slums did not build America, and a former professor of psychology who taught that men are capable of rational thought. Dagny understands that John is taking her on a tour of the men he had taken from her. The fourth stop is Ellis Wyatt’s oil shale facility. One of Wyatt’s two employees is the young brakeman caught by Dagny in the first chapter whistling the theme from Halley’s Fifth Concerto; he is now Halley’s best student. Wyatt is producing two hundred barrels of oil a day from shale.

Along the way she discovers that Ted Nielsen runs the lumber yard and Roger Marsh grows vegetables. The fifth stop is at Andrew Stockton’s foundry; he had to ruin a competitor, who is now his employee, to run it. Stockton says he would be happy to be ruined by Hank Rearden, who would revolutionize life in the valley. Ken Danagger turns out to be his foreman.

The sixth stop is the valley’s Main Street, home to Hammond Grocery, Mulligan General Store, Nielsen Lumber, and Mulligan & Akston Tobacco. Actress Kay Ludlow, who had disappeared five years earlier, now runs a cafeteria. Down the street is Mulligan Bank and Mulligan Mint, which produces coins of gold and silver like those from America’s past.

The seventh stop is the house of Francisco d’Anconia. Dagny now has figured out that John was the man to whom Francisco had pledged his life twelve years ago.

The eighth stop is the powerhouse. On the building is the inscription, “I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine.” As John pronounces the oath, the door to the powerhouse swings open, but he closes it quickly. When Dagny is ready to say those words and accept the consequences, he will show her the motor.

At dinner at Mulligan’s house, Midas introduces her in the US Navy manner as “Taggart Transcontinental”. Dagny dines with Ellis Wyatt, Ken Danagger, Hugh Akston, Dr. Hendricks, Quentin Daniels, Richard Halley and Judge Narragansett. To Dagny it is like going to heaven, meeting again the great people of one’s past. Danagger tells her what John had told him: “Well done.” Perhaps too well, in Dagny’s case.

Halley has composed more in the past decade than in all the previous years of his life. He appreciates Dagny’s recognizing his new piece from hearing just a few notes whistled by a brakeman, and he wants her to come over to his house for a private recital. Dr. Hendricks has made a breakthrough in treating strokes, the judge is writing a treatise on the philosophy of law, Mulligan is financing everything in the valley, and Akston is writing a book on moral philosophy. But no product of this work will ever be seen outside the valley; these men are on strike. John Galt launches into a speech about the mind, reason and how these men are on strike against the moral code that demands their martyrdom.

Each man at the table each went on strike for his own reason: Akston because he could no longer share his profession with those who denied the existence of the intellect; Mulligan because of the appeals court decision in the Hunsacker case, likewise Judge Narragansett; Halley because he could not forgive the public’s view of his success, seeing themselves as Halley’s compositional goal; Dr. Hendricks because the government took over the health care system; Wyatt because he decided not to be a meal for the cannibals; Danagger because he discovered that the men who wished to rule over him were impotent; Daniels because he did not wish to place his mind at the service of brute force; Galt because he refused to feel guilty about his abilities. After leaving Twentieth Century, John looked for any sign of talent in the world and pulled that man out of the world and into his. The men whom he recruited took an oath to deny their talents by withdrawing from the world or taking menial jobs. They would pursue their true interests in Mulligan’s valley – Galt’s Gulch – but share nothing with the world. Once a year they would come to the valley and meet for a month. Now things in the world are collapsing at a rate they had not foreseen. Soon they will be ready to return to rebuild the world.

At the Galt house, there is momentary pause at John’s bedroom, but the moment passes. Instead, Dagny is placed in the guest bedroom bearing the inscriptions of the men who had spent their first night at Galt’s Gulch there, each in his own private purgatory.

The first operational laser dates from 1960. Rand’s refractory ray and its magnetic effect on motors is interesting, but wide of the mark. The hologram that hides Galt’s Gulch is more on the order of the technology in the later “Star Trek” universe. For Fifties science fiction, however, it’s not bad.

The idea of extracting oil from shale was barely a glimmer in an oil man’s eye in the Fifties; not until the Seventies did the price of oil rise to the point where recovery from oil shale might be profitable. Here Rand was far ahead of the curve.

Rand never saw the possibilities of a global positioning system and spy satellites as a means of making it truly impossible to hide a site like Galt’s Gulch from the all-pervading eyes of government. The surveillance state’s technology was not on her horizon.

After of the Treaty of Paris in 1783, tensions with Britain eased, and the country got around to governing itself under the Articles of Confederation. But the war debt caused major problems, not the least of which was a deflationary depression. A few states took their debts seriously, but others engaged in partial or total repudiation. At the same time, the Continental Dollar, supposedly backed by one Spanish Milled Dollar each, was collapsing in value because there was no real backing except for a nebulous promise to pay. Enlisted men in the Continental Army had been paid in paper dollars, and they expected those dollars to be honored at full value.

There were only three banks in the entire country; these banks didn’t care about the farmer, the shopkeeper, or the wage slave, but only the owner of the textile mill in Lawrence, Massachusetts, the import-export business in Manhattan, or the iron foundry in Batsto, New Jersey. Ordinary Americans held their wealth in their mattresses and under their floorboards. Without a genuine coin of the realm, people relied on coins of gold and silver minted in Spain, England and France, along with base metal coins minted by the states. Coins of precious metal were often “clipped”, so merchants weighed them to see just how much gold and silver were really present.

While farmers and shopkeepers could survive without a coin of the realm, the owners of the banks and large businesses could not. How could a capitalist perform the Italian art of accounting if there is no coin of the realm? How can he construct a balance sheet or income and expense statement if there is no standard by which to measure value?

The states that wanted to treat their war debts honorably had a problem. The basic unit of governance in America was the county. The county collected the property tax, and a voter had to show his tax receipt at election time to the county clerk in order to vote. The county built the roads and maintained the poorhouse for indigents. States collected taxes for their own purposes, but repaying war debts would require a major hike in taxes, and a war had just been fought over that.

There is an old saying in the word of taxation: “Don’t tax him, don’t tax me, tax the guy behind the tree.” The states that wanted to retire their war debts found a way of taxing the guy behind the tree – they taxed the residents of other states. After all, residents of other states could not vote in state elections, so the states charged tariffs on goods crossing state lines. The Connecticut farmer who loaded his wagon and took his produce to New York to sell now found himself confronted at the state line by a New York customs agent who slapped taxes on his produce. Quickly other states took up the idea, and a full scale trade war erupted.

Then the issue of the legality of the Continental Dollar came to a head when Massachusetts refused to accept it in payment of taxes in spite of the words “legal tender”. And that led to Shays’ Rebellion, which led to the Constitutional Convention.

In 1790, Alexander Hamilton, now Secretary of the Treasury under Washington, pushed for assumption, the act of taking the debts of the states and nationalizing them. What Hamilton wanted was financial ballast. A ship without ballast is gyroscopically unstable and tosses and turns on the sea. Hamilton believed that a properly managed national debt would act as ballast and be a blessing. Hamilton didn’t figure this out on his own but copied Sir Robert Walpole who established the Bank of England in 1694. The key was “properly managed”. Hamilton saw a national debt as a way of encouraging a basic conservatism in American finance. By rolling the state debts into a national debt, Hamilton effectively monetized all those Continental Dollars whose value had dropped almost to zero. On a weekly basis, Hamilton’s clerk at Treasury went down to the New York Stock Exchange and either bought or sold Treasury bills, thus managing the money supply; this is similar to what the Federal Reserve does today. Was each new American dollar backed by the proper amount of gold or silver as mandated by the Constitution? No. And that is one of our lesser known financial secrets: the US Dollar started out as a fiat currency in violation of the Constitution’s Gold and Silver Clause.

It should be noted that the Gold and Silver Clause has been honored more in the breach than in the observance.

Hamilton intended the US Mint in Philadelphia to fix the gold and silver problem. Congress established gold and silver coins of different denominations, and people who owned foreign coins or bars of gold and silver could take them to the Mint, which would smelt them to the correct purity and mint coins of the realm, which would in turn be handed back to the owner to be placed in circulation.

Hamilton’s consolidated war debt was paid off by James Monroe’s first term, and the new debt accrued during the War of 1812 came close to being paid off by the end of Andrew Jackson’s first term. That led to a problem. Under Nicholas Biddle, the Bank of the United States had put aside its function of neutral arbiter of capital allocation and had played favorites. Biddle saw this as a prudent form of industrial planning, making him the father of Japan’s MITI, Max Palevsky, Felix Rohatyn – and Jimmy Carter.

When Jackson ran for reelection in 1832, his campaign slogan was “Jackson and No Bank”. Jackson referred to the Bank as “The Monster” and made its abolition the cornerstone of his second term. Biddle inadvertently helped Jackson when he fought the president in Congress by allocating capital to congressmen who were the Bank’s friends and punishing its enemies via foreclosure. It was a fatal mistake. With the end of the Bank, the national debt was gone – and so was the financial ballast. And the sharp practitioners of Wall Street were ready for a world under a gold exchange standard.

In the world of finance, there is Smart Money, Stupid Money, and Widows’ and Orphans’ Money.

With the end of good, safe government bonds, an asset bubble began to form on Wall Street in stocks. The Smart Money had already staked a claim, and the Stupid Money followed; next came the Widows and Orphans. It should be noted that the primary business of Wall Street is to fleece investors by inflating and bursting bubbles, known as “pump and dump” in the trade.

The bubble in stocks created the illusion of prosperity, and Jackson never understood what he had wrought. With the luck of the Scots-Irish, Jackson left the presidency to Martin van Buren before the Panic of 1837 erupted. People lost their savings, their homes, their farms, and froze to death in the cities. The road back was slow, arduous, and interrupted by other financial calamities, such as the Panic of 1857, when a ship full of gold coins minted in San Francisco was lost at sea in a hurricane off the coast of South Carolina. That hole in the money supply launched a panic from which the Cotton South recovered more rapidly than the industrialized North. In 1860, that led to a fatal miscalculation by the southern states.

To avoid usurious interest rates from the House of Morgan, Abraham Lincoln issued a paper fiat currency known as the greenback, which was to finance the War Between the States and then get mopped up via federal tax collections afterward. Upon being withdrawn from circulation, the disappearing fiat money triggered deflation and the Panic of 1873, which set off a depression.

In 1913, America established the Federal Reserve, which was not exactly a national bank because it was owned by a cartel of private banks. But the country was still on the gold standard. The calamity of October 1929 and the events that followed inadvertently made the dollar stronger with respect to European currencies. To permit expansion of the money supply via inflation, Franklin Roosevelt closed the gold window for domestic payments and made the possession of gold by Americans illegal. This permitted America to fight a deflationary depression and a world war by printing massive amounts of money.

The Bretton Woods Agreement of 1944 made the US Dollar the world’s reserve currency linked to gold at the 1934 price. This functioned well until Lyndon Johnson’s disastrous “guns and butter” decision of 1965, which led to the London Gold Pool as an attempt to support the dollar by suppressing the gold price. Charles de Gaulle put an end to that by demanding payment in gold for France, which prompted Richard Nixon to close the gold window to foreign payments, which in turn set off the double-digit inflation of the Seventies. In 1975 Americans again were permitted to possess gold as a result. Fed Chairman Paul Volcker pushed interest rates above 20%, thus ending the inflation of consumer prices, but the liquidity spigot was never turned off, which led to the inflation of asset prices in the 1982-2007 bull market in stocks and real estate.

Fiat currencies can be very messy and full of unintended consequences. But so can gold.

Howdy, Pub’!

Two sections down of three, and now we commence the final one, “A is A,” which title, as we have seen, is Aristotle’s identity axiom, one of three borrowed from his Metaphysics. This, the first chapter in the final section, is entitled “Atlantis” inasmuch as its activities take place in a remote, semi-mythical Colorado valley in which Dagny has crashed. Francisco had told Dagny that her road would lead her to Atlantis, and he meant it literally, but he did not mean as a result of an air pursuit. She is there, she is welcome, but because she has not reached it by virtue of intellectual and moral conviction she is profoundly an outsider, a “scab.”

Parallels to the versions of Paradise described by various religions are, in my opinion, quite deliberate, and were Rand not quite so deadly serious about the thing one might almost say satirical. Dagny has a near-death experience and wakes up in a perfect world, in the arms of a perfect man, in the company only of good people, the bad ones being banished. Heaven, of course. Or Valhalla.

Not to belabor the point, John Galt turns out to have some remarkably Christ-like characteristics, being, after all, the man “without pain or fear or guilt,” stepping completely formed from the unknown as Akston (who, we are told, is Galt’s “father” who did not conceive him) describes it later, like Minerva from Zeus’s head, which is as near as Rand could get to virgin birth without being named in a plagiarism lawsuit by the ghost of Saint Matthew.

Nor are we spared a description of his physical perfection that might have been culled from a Danielle Steele novel:

The light cloth of his shirt seemed to stress, rather than hide, the structure of his figure, his skin was suntanned, his body had the hardness, the gaunt, tensile strength, the clean precision of a foundry casting, he looked as if he were poured out of metal, but some dimmed, soft-lustered metal, like an aluminum-copper alloy, the color of his skin blending with the chestnut-brown of his hair, the loose strands of the hair shading from brown to gold in the sun, and his eyes completing the colors, as the one part of the casting left undimmed and harshly lustrous; his eyes were the deep, dark green of light glinting on metal.

That is a single sentence. Dear God.

When we finally get to dialogue it’s actually quite good, every sentence holding a double meaning, an allusion to what came before.

“Don’t move, Miss Taggart. You’re hurt.”

“You know me?” Her voice was impersonal and hard.

“I’ve known you for many years.”

“Have I known you?”

“Yes, I think so.”

“What is your name?”

“John Galt.”

She looked at him, not moving.

“Why are you frightened?” he asked.

“Because I believe it.”

And through the chapter we actually discover that so long as we can keep from drowning in Rand’s schoolgirl gushing he is rather a likable fellow after all. All right, well, just one more:

…Aware with abnormal intensity of the pressure of his hands against her body, of the gold and copper threads of his hair, the shadows of his lashes on the skin of his face a few inches away from hers…

We’re not quite two pages into the chapter. Hank Somebodyorother has become a distant memory. Hasn’t he? One touch of Randian weirdness:

…but she had always known that an emotion was a sum totaled by an adding machine of the mind…

Stop the pain, please. No, it isn’t, although that grotesque metaphor does explain a good deal about Dagny’s love life… one more, I can’t help myself:

…The sole suggestion of luxury was the color of his hair – the strands stirring in the wind like liquid gold and copper…

OK, I’ll stop now. We get the point. Galt’s an android.

On a granite column at the entrance to Atlantis is a three-foot dollar sign made of solid gold, Francisco’s gently mocking tribute to its foundation. It is the logo on the cigarettes and their package, the totem of a world that is formed around moral propositions that are the opposite of those of the looters. In the year 1982 there was another huge dollar sign, a floral arrangement twice that size that was laid on the grave of Ayn Rand. In what is likely an accidental irony, she and her beloved Frank O’Connor are buried in Valhalla, NY.

The valley itself is protected by the illusion of a nearby mountaintop projected overhead that was, as Galt puts it:

“…calculated against everything – except a courage such as yours… you hit the ray screen. Some of the rays are the kind that kill magnetic motors…”

Courage or more likely suicidal stupidity, actually, but Galt is too polite (or smitten) to make the point. Midas Mulligan, however, is not, and delivers a bluntly outspoken rebuke to Dagny’s recklessness when he suddenly appears, the true owner of the valley. Galt? “He just works here.”

It is, incidentally, one of the few dated moments in this 50-year-old novel, this “ray screen” business that kills “magnetic,” by which one hopes Rand means “reciprocating” engines. In this Atlantis philosophers are also competent engineers and fry cooks; in the real world sometimes they only think they are. (One is struck by the similarity of Akston behind a short-order grill and his successors chanting the tragic mantra of the liberal arts major, “You want fries with that?”) Later there will be similarly dated allusions to technologies that our contemporary perspective may make us a little too ready to mock, as well as to ones we cannot mock because they have become reality.

At last Dagny makes the connection the reader made some chapters ago – Galt is the inventor of the miracle motor, and a similar generator powers the valley. Quentin Daniels is delighted – giddy, even – to be Galt’s understudy, and we learn that a number of the valley’s inhabitants are the happy subordinates to geniuses in their field. Others have excelled in fields quite outside their nominal areas of expertise in the “other” world – Hammond, the master mechanic, runs a grocery store, Dwight Sanders (who constructed Dagny’s wrecked aircraft) is a pig farmer, Judge Narragansett, who ruled in Mulligan’s favor in the long-forgotten disposition of the Twentieth Century Motor Company, raises dairy cows and chickens. Rand’s case is that those characteristics which allow an individual to excel in complex industrial or intellectual fields lend themselves well to agriculture and low-level infrastructure maintenance (Dick McNamara turns up as a lineman), but that the reverse is not true. It is the case of an idealist. Sometimes – perhaps more often than not, but not always – it’s true.

Oilman Ellis Wyatt is there, having solved the problem of the extraction of oil from shale. (That’s what I meant by that caution against snickering at Rand’s “rays.”) He has hired Dagny’s brakeman, the young fellow who whistled Richard Halley’s (also a valley inhabitant) Fifth Concerto lo those many months ago. Owen Kellogg is a resident. And yes, so is Francisco d’Anconia.

Wyatt tosses off a sentence that has since become an Objectivist aphorism: “…there’s no such thing as a lousy job – only lousy men who don’t care to do it.” Like many of Rand’s asseverations it’s true to a point, but not always. I once met a distinguished Japanese gentleman who was in the business of high-tolerance machining, who had spent World War II in the very building we were in at the time, an old torpedo factory. His job had been to smack test fuzes with a hammer to ensure they didn’t go off prematurely. That, my friends, was a lousy job.

Galt provides an insouciant contrast to Dagny’s occasionally overdramatic personality:

[Galt] “How did you happen to be following me?”

“I landed at the Afton airport just as you were taking off. The man there told me that Quentin Daniels had gone with you.”

“I remember your plane circling to land. But that was the one and only time when I didn’t think of you. I thought you were coming by train.” “How do you want me to understand that?”

“What?”

“The one and only time when you didn’t think of me.”

He held her glance. “Any way you wish,” he answered.

She asked coldly, in the tone of an enemy’s accusation, “You knew that I was coming for Quentin Daniels?”

“Yes.”

“You got him first and fast, in order not to let me reach him? In order to beat me – knowing fully what sort of beating that would mean for me?”

“Sure.”

A nice choice of rejoinder, I think. One almost sees his shrug and her fury. And later:

As they drove on along the edge of the lake, she asked, “You’ve mapped this route deliberately, haven’t you? You’re showing me all the men whom – “ she stopped, feeling inexplicably reluctant to say it, and said, instead – “whom I have lost?”

“I’m showing all the men whom I have taken away from you,” he answered firmly.

Speaking only of first impressions and only for myself, I should say that Rand, and Dagny, worship Galt for his perfection and that I like him despite it. That is apparently the minority opinion. We meet for a moment a nameless, beautiful young woman who is fishing for a living. She is, tellingly, a novelist.

Dagny jerked her head to look back and saw the glance with which the young woman stood looking after Galt. And even though hopelessness, serenely accepted, was part of the worship in the glance, she experienced a feeling she had never known before: a stab of jealousy.

Hank who? Francisco who? Well, here we see their fate, and the upshot of Rand’s flawed conception of human sexuality: it is “hopelessness, serenely accepted.” In no other aspect of human life would Rand permit this sort of inert fatalism.

So is this valley – Galt calls it “Mulligan’s Valley” – really heaven? Mulligan invites all of Dagny’s old friends to dinner at his place to honor her arrival. Let Dagny speak for herself:

She laughed suddenly… “This looks like…you know, I had never hoped to see any of you again, I wondered at times how much I’d give for just one more glimpse or one more word…now this is like that dream you imagine in childhood, when you think that someday, in heaven, you will see those great departed…from all the past centuries, the great men you would like to meet…”

“And that’s one clue to the nature of our secret,” said Akston. “Ask yourself whether the dream of heaven and greatness should be left waiting for us in our graves – or whether it should be ours here and now on this earth.”

And there we have it. It is a highly significant statement, the reason that Rand may rightfully claim her philosophy to be life-affirming. There are difficulties, of course – I should give a good deal for an afternoon drinking with the likes of Franklin, Washington, Montaigne, Alcibiades, Edmund Burke, Oda Nobunaga. That is quite outside the confines of the here and now - that is the point of Paradise, after all, to transcend the here and now. But it is heaven on this earth that is Rand’s aim, a heaven she clearly feels is within the capacities of men, a heaven denied by the profound moral error that is the credo of the parasites, the looters, the moochers, that has so twisted and warped its host society that no remedy less than the latter’s dissolution will suffice. Atlas shrugging is that dissolution.

“Given up?” said Hugh Akston. “Check your premises, Miss Taggart. None of us has given up. It is the world that has... All work is an act of philosophy. And when men will learn to consider productive work – and that which is its source – as the standard of their moral values, they will reach that state of perfection which is the birthright they lost.”

Each of the men at dinner – and they are all men, for Dagny moves in a world of men, and it is revealing that of the women she has met in the valley so far her only real reaction is a fleeting moment of jealousy – each of these gives a brief disquisition on the reasons for his going on strike, for at last we realize courtesy of a three-page paragraph from Galt’s mouth that they are, in fact, on strike. Last of all,

She turned to Galt. “And you?” she asked. “You were first. What made you come to it?”

He chuckled. “My refusal to be born with any original sin…That night, at the Twentieth Century meeting, when I heard an unspeakable evil being spoken in a tone of moral righteousness, I saw the root of the world’s tragedy, the key to it, and the solution. I saw what had to be done. I went out to do it.”

“…What did you do when you walked out of the Twentieth Century?” she asked.

“I went out to become a flame-spotter. I made it my job to watch out for those bright flares in the growing night of savagery, which were the men of ability, the men of the mind – to watch their course…and to pull them out, when I knew that they had seen enough.”

A lonely life, that of the outcast. How many of them are there, even now, in today’s America?

“Our sole relief were the rare occasions when we could see one another. We found that we liked to meet – in order to be reminded that human beings still existed. So we came to set aside one month a year to spend in this valley – to rest, to live in a rational world, to bring our real work out of hiding, to trade our achievements… Each of us built his own house here, at his own expense – for one month of life out of twelve. It made the other eleven easier to bear.”

It does explain the persistent references to one month’s vacation at a mystery location. And that’s all it was in the beginning, when the valley was a resort in the precise meaning of the word. It is now a nearly self-sufficient community courtesy of the industrialists who made their last stand in Colorado and now need somewhere to hide, literally, for they face imprisonment for the crime of striking – “deserting,” as Dr. Ferris put it. And who, we are to remember, wished to have them shot for it.

“We started with no time limit in view,” said Galt. “We did not know whether we’d live to see the liberation of the world or whether we’d have to leave our battle and our secret to the next generations… But now we think that we will see, and soon, the day of our victory and our return.”

“…when men see that neither their hearts nor their muscles can save them, but the mind they damned is not there to answer their screams for help… when they have no pretense of authority left, no remnant of law, no trace of morality, no hope, no food, and no way to obtain it – when they collapse and the road is clear – then we’ll come back to rebuild the world.”

Well, that’s the plan, anyway. Like most utopian schemes it is far more specific on how the present is to be broken down than it is on how the future is going to be built. The former is by far the easier of the two, as many a socialist revolutionary has found to his eventual dismay. But at least here we have the possibility inasmuch as these men and women already have built something in their lives. Che Guevara never did anything but destroy.

The dinner ends, and Dagny is escorted back to her host’s house for the evening. The guest room is a curious one – it is the place where each of the strikers spent his or her first night after severing ties with the outside world. It is a place of sleepless pain, of renunciation, with the graffiti on the walls to prove it. And – mirabile dictu! - the two of them do not wind up in Galt’s bedroom after all, although she contemplates his door and he contemplates her body. Sexual self-denial, in Rand? Yes, of course – sex is the consummation of intellectual convergence and Dagny is still not ready to put out on that level. It isn’t a case of a monastic renunciation of the world and the flesh, it turns out to be a choice between the one or the other. Saint Francis would have laughed to tears, and like his, Dagny’s plea is “but not yet.” Oh, and the valley?

“I call it Mulligan’s Valley,” he said. “The others call it Galt’s Gulch.”

Have a great week, Publius!

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.