Atlas Shrugged – Day 055 – pp. 609-618
Chapter VIII – By Our Love…
A rather sappy title for Rand, no?
We’ve shifted scenes to Dagny’s cabin in the woods. It’s May 28. Let’s see. If she left on the day the directive was implemented – May 1 – she’s been there about a month.
Working on her mission…
“. . .three assignments given, as orders, to herself: rest — learn to live without the railroad — get the pain out of the way.”
I guess I can’t imagine what you do with yourself, when you go from spending your whole life at the office working and running a national railroad to living in a log cabin out in the middle of nowhere. You’d think the shock to your system would be pretty harsh.
“She cleared the brush from under her walls, she re-shingled the roof, she repainted the door and the frames of the windows.”
Apparently not for Dagny! (Jeez – is there anything she can’t do??)
But this is Rand reminding us who Dagny is. (And true to form, she takes five pages to do it. Anybody out there think this book could have been just as well written in 800 pages?)
Rand describes the dilapidated, decaying conditions of the nearby town and the roads that go to and from. She tells us about the ideas that run through Dagny’s head about how easily life and prosperity could be injected back into it all.
Rand describes her moods — good days and bad. Days when life is wonderful, days when she can’t stop thinking about the railroad. And days when she’s thinking about Hank.
Personally, I think her greatest torture is her inability to sit still. She has an inherent need to be industrious, productive. She’s said it before when she described two things she loved dearly: the Taggart engines and Francisco.
They both displayed “purposeful action.”
Purposeful action is the key to her universe. I’d guess to all their universes. Rand doesn’t talk much about any of the missing characters without emphasizing their sense of “business.”
When Ken Dannager quit, he suggested to Dagny they go to Manhattan and take a ferry ride around the island. Inconceivable before.
But five pages are all summed up by Rand in one sentence.
“Is it not proper for man’s life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him — man’s life must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station . . .”
Then she thinks about the motor and whether that project is worth pursuing. This peek into her head gives us an inkling that she understands the mission of the men who have disappeared:
“. . .it is not true that there is no place in the future for a superlative achievement of man’s mind; it can never be true.”
And as she’s pondering this, a car drives up. She expects it to be Hank. It’s not. (Cue dramatic – romantic? – music.)
It’s Francisco.
“Hi Slug.”
“Hi Frisco.”
Deep down, she still likes him.
So Francisco has arrived right in time with her revelation that there will always be a place for “superlative achievement.”
He runs to her and grabs her and pulls her to him to kiss him. . . (I wonder if Francisco’s been reading along. — Actually, he probably doesn’t know about Dagny and Hank. He knows everything else. . . But Rand never has given that tid-bit up. Hmmm. A new plot twist begins.)
Dagny pulls back.
“Not yet. You have a great deal to forgive me, first. But I can tell you everything now.”
Starts with what he was whistling while coming up the hill — Halley’s fifth concerto. (I guess we know what happened to Richard Halley.)
OK, lets drive the point home one more time.
“Are you happy because I’ve lost everything I lived for?”
“Dagny, we can never lose the things we live for. We may have to change their form at times, if we’ve made an error, but the purpose remains the same and the forms are our to make.”
“That is what I’ve been telling myself for a month. But there’s no way left open toward any purpose whatever.”
She’s getting it — but she don’t GOT it.
“Do you feel you’ve betrayed Taggart Trans?”
“No. I. . .I feel that I would have betrayed it by remaining at work. . . . If I had agreed to serve the looters, it’s . . .it’s Nat Taggart that I would have delivered to them.”
Half way home.
To shed some light, Francisco explains it was the same thing for him – to give up d’Anconia Copper.
“Dagny, you’re more fortunate than I. Taggart Trans is a delicate piece of precision machinery. It will not last long without you. It can not be run by slave labor. They will mercifully destroy it for you and you won’t have to see it serving the looters. But copper mining is a simpler job. D’Anconia Copper could have lasted for generations of looters and slaves. Crudely, miserably, ineptly — but it could have lasted and helped them to last. I had to destroy it myself.”
She realizes that even though he’s hung around, Francisco is one of the quitters too.
And now she’s a quitter. I think, still sort of getting it.
“It seems monstrously wrong to surrender the world to the looters, and monstrously wrong to live under their rule. I can neither give up nor go back,. I can neither exist without work nor work as a serf. . . . It’s surrender if we leave – and surrender, if we remain. I don’t know what is right nay longer.”
Ahhhh. But Francisco was ready for that. . .
“Check your premises, Dagny. Contradictions don’t exist.”
Damned if you do and damned if you don’t can never be the case. There always has to be a course of action. Even if it’s “inaction” . . .?