Atlas Shrugged – Day 082 – pp. 882-891
Yeah, Jim keeps heading on down the path with Cherryl.
“What path is that?” you say.
The Socio-path. (rim-shot!)
He’s simpering, sniveling, begging. Telling her he loves her. He needs her. No one else understands him
“I need you . . . I’m all alone. You’re not like the others. I believe in you. I trust you. What has all that money and fame and business and struggle given me? You’re all I have . . .”
Cherryl sees through his bullshit about the suffering, but seems to believe that his suffering is real. (The crazy characters always get the Oscars.) So she figures she owes it to him to make an effort to understand.
She asks what he wants from her.
He says “Love.”
She replies to be loved for what?
This, of course would imply some kind of human value that would earn an amount of love. So Jim gets indignant.
“You think that love is a matter of mathematics, of exchange, of weighing and measuring, like a pound of butter on a grocery counter? I don’t want to be loved for anything. I want to be loved for myself. . .”
Then he goes into a bit we’ve heard before.
“Love is a gift — a great, free, unconditional gift that transcends and forgives everything. What’s the generosity of loving a man for his virtues?”
That last line. Where’d I hear it? I’m thinking it was Lillian ranting to Hank at the Wayne-Falkland before she knew about Dagny. Or maybe somewhere else? I think it’s Rand’s stamp on a corrupted idea of “love” like the looters have corrupted industry.
Yep. Cherryl’s got it.
“All of you welfare preachers– it’s not unearned money that you’re after. You want handouts, but of a different kind. I’m a gold-digger of the spirit because I look for value. Then you the welfare preachers. . . it’s the spirit that you want to loot.”
Bingo. Once a looter, always a looter.
The butler arrives with the champagne they orders about 20 pages ago. Jim insists they drink to Francisco d’Anconia.
She refuses.
He smashes his glass and leaves.
Cherryl goes to her room, gets a coat and goes out.
Cut to Dagny’s . . . Office? No, I guess she’s working at home. It’s August 5th – a month after her departure from paradise. And she’s busied herself with trying to “delay the collapse of a railroad. . .”
All the while dreaming of John Galt.
Suddenly her doorbell rings.
It’s Cherryl.
“I came to pay a debt.”
Cherryl apologizes for the awful things she said to Dagny almost a year before at her wedding. (Even though Dagny got the zinger in. . .) She confesses that now she knows it was her and not Jim who was the force behind Taggart Trans. Doesn’t expect Dagny’s forgiveness. Just wanted to say it.
Well, time for a little sisterly bonding.
Sisters, not via Jim Taggart, but via their beliefs about the world. (Somehow that’s not so sexy.)
Cherryl is beginning to see Dagny’s softer side. She’s not so cold and unfeeling as Jim and his cohorts have accused her of being.
Never at a loss for a bit of preaching, Dagny sets the record straight.
“But it’s true, Cherryl. I am, in the sense they mean – only have they ever told you in just what sense they mean it? . . . Whenever anyone accuses some person of being ‘unfeeling,’ he means that that person is just. He means that that person has no causeless emotions and will not grant him a feeling which he does not deserve. . . . You never hear it said by a good person about those who fail to do him justice. But you always hear it said by a rotter about those who treat him as a rotter, those who don’t feel any sympathy for the evil he’s committed or for the pain he suffers as a consequence.”
The opposite of charity is justice.
Cherryl goes on about how she doesn’t know what’s real or who she can trust anymore. It’s like she’s too confused to understand anything. Nothing seems to be what it is.
“. . . there have been centuries of philosophers plotting to turn the world into just that — to destroy people’s minds by making them believe that that’s what they’re seeing.”
When in doubt, it’s always best to distort reality. Like, never let a good crisis go to waste? TSA anyone?
But how did Dagny maintain through all those years of trials?
“By holding to just one rule. . . . To place nothing – nothing – above the verdict of my own mind. . . . [and] The knowledge that my life is the highest of values, too high to give up without a fight.”
“. . . people always made me feel as if they thought it was a sin . . .”
Of course they do, Cherryl. They’re the looters.
Cherryl gets up to leave. Dagny offers for her to stay. She says she’ll be alright. (Hope nothing happens to her when she gets home.)
But she asks if she can come back to speak to Dagny again.
Dagny makes her promise she will.
A new education has begun.