Atlas Shrugged – Day 073 – pp. 792-801
Galt, Francisco and Dagny walk out to see d’Anconia Copper mine #1.
Francisco and Galt chat but Dagny is watching Francisco. She notices the “quality of his glance whenever it rested on Galt.”
Francisco obviously looks up to Galt. He’s the alpha dog in this pound.
And the way Rand is describing this, or at least the way I’m reading it, it’s leaving me with a little bad taste in my mouth. (Like a really cheap cigar.)
This valley, is where they should all be alpha dogs. Leader of their own universes. That Rand’s presenting (or at least I’m reading) some kind of subservience on Francisco’s part pisses me off. Francisco. The guy who took apart the crowd at Jim Taggart’s wedding. The guy who could endure anything for the cause he knew was right.
I don’t like it. (And not just because he’s not getting the girl, ’cause I’m not like a romantic mush head or anything…)
Internal Dagny monologue:
“What will it do to him when he learns? — she wondered, and felt a bitter voice reminding her that there would, perhaps, never be any truth of this kind to learn.”
Fuck you, Dagny. OK, I’m over it.
Anyway, they make their pitch.
Galt tells Francisco he’s wasting too much effort unloading ore by mule. Francisco responds that he knows but it would be so much work for such a small length of track.
Bingo!
She jumps to the fray. She’s describing the areas of land where a small rail could easily be built, where the grades are small enough to manage any kind of small engine. They hand her a piece of paper. She starts drawing plans and designs. Bridges and trestles. And then realizes what she’s doing.
Almost had her.
“I can’t . . .” she whispered, “not yet.”
If only she wouldn’t have to hear about the destruction of her railroad on the outside. Galt puts on his alpha dog hat.
There is no avoiding reality in the valley. Period.
Francisco reminds her of the first time she dropped out. If she joins them now, she wouldn’t have to waste her life re-shingling roofs and building paths to nowhere.
BTW, how did Francisco find her? John told him. What’d he tell him?
“He said, ‘If you want your chance, take it. You’ve earned it.’. ..”
Why? Because John Galt wanted to break off a piece of Dagny for himself? But he was doing the noble thing — which in reality (according to his romantic reality) — he shouldn’t be doing.
You don’t sacrifice for the benefit of your fellow man. I don’t know. This objectivism isn’t translating too well into the romantic story of the book.
Francisco invites Dagny to come spend her last week in the valley with him.
But she’s got a job.
Galt says she can quit.
She says she’s a “prisoner.” The decision has to be Galt’s
“You want it to be mine?”
“Yes!”
“Very well. . . . Then no.”
He shrugged, regretfully but gaily. “You’re probably right. If you can’t prevent her form going back — nobody can.”
That’s the shit I’m talking about. That subservient tone. He was ready to kill Hank Rearden at Dagny’s and had to hold back. Here, he “shrugs, regretfully but gaily”!?!? Does Francisco not know it’s over between him and Dagny? Does he not know things are heating up between her and John Galt? He knows everything!! And besides, this is the second time he’s lost the same girl. That doesn’t happen in real life, does it?
Arrrrggghhhh!
Then Rand tries to appease me:
[Galt to Dagny] “You had to put me to a test in order to learn whether I’d fall to the lowest possible stage of altruism. (She does not answer) Nobody stays here by faking reality in any manner whatever.”
Rand elaborates for me:
[Dagny has the] immediate vividness of sensory perception, an exact picture of what the code of self-sacrifice would have meant. . .Galt giving up the woman he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling out of existence and himself out of her life . . . she, turning for consolation to a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake, since her will to self-deceit was the essential required for Galt’s self-sacrifice, the living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting, as relief for an unhealing wound some moments of weary affection . . . Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two who were dearest to him and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved. . .
Alright, maybe they’re all better off. I still think Rand’s a little inconsistent on the romantic storyline. No matter, I’m a little tired of the romance and philosophy. I’m ready for some swordplay.
Not yet though.
“Did it ever occur to you, Miss Taggart, that there is no conflict of interest among men, neither in business nor in trade nor in their most personal desires — if they omit the irrational from their view of the possible and destruction from their view of the practical. . . .There is no conflict, . . . if man understands that reality is an absolute not to be faked, . . . a wish for the irrational is not to be achieved. . .”
They part ways at the bottom of the trail. She heads to Larry Hammond’s for groceries for dinner. As she goes, she begins to think of their relationship.
“His wife — she thought, letting herself hear consciously the word. . . for three weeks she had been his wife in ever sense but one, and that final one was still to be earned. . .”
What is it with Rand about “earning” a piece. Well, she’s nothing if not strict in her application. Can we get on with some action please?
Ah! As she’s buying groceries, she and Hammond hear the sound of a plane circling the valley.
What!? And intruder?!
She rushes to the airfield where she looks through the telescope. It was,
“. . .the place whose silver wings bore the number that belong to Hank Rearden.”
She rushes out on to a ledge on a cliff and shouts to him.
Suddenly her choice is intensified.
It ain’t John Galt or Francisco. It’s Galt or Hank. And the stakes are high.
“If she left the valley, the screen would close for her as tightly, Atlantis would descend under a vault of rays more impregnable than the bottom of the ocean. . .”
But maybe it’s not Hank. It’s John Galt versus what’s left of the outside world.
“[it] was not the image of Hank Rearden — she knew that she could not return to him, even if she returned to the world – the pull was the vision of Hank Rearden’s courage and the courage of all those still fighting to stay alive. . . . Was she certain that no chance remained for the world of Taggart Trans? Was she certain that the terms of the battle were such that she could not care to win?”
What will she choose?????