Part Three, Chapters III–IV (3 - 4)

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Part 3 Ch3

Well, when Dagny went on Scudders show, what a show that was:

“I came here to tell you about the social program, the political system and the moral philosophy under which you are now living.”

“I am proud that he had chosen me to give him pleasure and that it was he who had been my choice. It was not— as it is for most of you— an act of casual indulgence and mutual contempt. It was the ultimate form of our admiration for each other, with full knowledge of the values by which we made our choice. We are those who do not disconnect the values of their minds from the actions of their bodies, those who do not leave their values to empty dreams, but bring them into existence, those who give material form to thoughts, and reality to values— those who make steel, railroads and happiness.

If you would like to know more about Rand’s view on romantic love, this book I recently read, does a great job of applying Rand‘s Objectivism to relationships, The Selfish Path to Romance: How to Love with Passion and Reason by Drs. Ellen Kenner and Edwin Locke. Rand also wrote about relationships, see her “On a Woman President”, Peikoff’s book Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand the chapter on sex.

Her views on love/sex can be found:
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/love.html
http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/sex.html


This is the best part of Dagny’s speech:

It was the blackmail threat that our relationship would be made public that forced Hank Rearden to sign the Gift Certificate surrendering Rearden Metal. It was blackmail— blackmail by your government officials, by your rulers, by your—” In the instant when Scudder’s hand swept out to knock the microphone over, a faint click came from its throat as it crashed to the floor, signifying that the intellectual cop had cut the broadcast off the air. She laughed— but there was no one to see her and to hear the nature of her laughter.

Part 3 Ch. 4

This is a chapter that largely deals with Cherryl.

Recall her hero worship of Taggart. But, as the marriage went on… that vision of him, eroded…

“I must learn everything that Mrs. James Taggart is expected to know and to be,” was the way she explained her purpose to a teacher of etiquette. She set out to learn with the devotion, the discipline, the drive of a military cadet or a religious novice. It was the only way, she thought, of earning the height which her husband had granted her on trust, of living up to his vision of her, which it was now her duty to achieve. And, not wishing to confess it to herself, she felt also that at the end of the long task she would recapture her vision of him, that knowledge would bring back to her the man she had seen on the night of his railroad’s triumph.

Knowledge did not seem to bring her a clearer vision of Jim’s world, but to make the mystery greater. She could not believe that she was supposed to feel respect for the dreary senselessness of the art shows which his friends attended, of the novels they read, of the political magazines they discussed— the art shows, where she saw the kind of drawings she had seen chalked on any pavement of her childhood’s slums— the novels, that purported to prove the futility of science, industry, civilization and love, using language that her father would not have used in his drunkenest moments— the magazines, that propounded cowardly generalities, less clear and more stale than the sermons for which she had condemned the preacher of the slum mission as a mealy-mouthed old fraud. She could not believe that these things were the culture she had so reverently looked up to and so eagerly waited to discover. She felt as if she had climbed a mountain toward a jagged shape that had looked like a castle and had found it to be the crumbling ruin of a gutted warehouse.

With how many times she mentioned phony in the following here, I thought I was reading J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye for a minute…

She felt an instant of terror at the first touch of a concept she had not known to be possible: What if Jim was not taken in by them? She could understand the phoniness of Dr. Pritchett, she thought— it was a racket that gave him an undeserved income; she could even admit the possibility, by now, that Jim might be a phony in his own business; what she could not hold inside her mind was the concept of Jim as a phony in a racket from which he gained nothing, an unpaid phony, an unvenal phony; the phoniness of a cardsharp or a con man seemed innocently wholesome by comparison. She could not conceive of his motive; she felt only that the headlight moving upon her had grown larger.

This is a revealing passage about the nature of Taggart:

She did not know what he wanted of her. It was not flattery that he wanted, she had seen him listening to the obsequious compliments of liars, listening with a look of resentful inertness— almost the look of a drug addict at a dose inadequate to rouse him. But she had seen him look at her as if he were waiting for some reviving shot and, at times, as if he were begging. She had seen a flicker of life in his eyes whenever she granted him some sign of admiration— yet a burst of anger was his answer, whenever she named a reason for admiring him. He seemed to want her to consider him great, but never dare ascribe any specific content to his greatness.

Now things are coming together for her, once she talked to Eddie Willers. The very thing that attracted her to James Taggart, her thinking of him as being a real hero, he in fact was not…

“That night . . . those headlines . . . that glory . . . it was not you at all . . . it was Dagny.”

Bingo.

Then after much convo, she just had to get out of there, and she ends up going to see Dagny of all people.

[…]you see, I married Jim because I . . . I thought that he was you. I thought that he was Taggart Transcontinental. Now I know that he’s”— she hesitated, then went on firmly, as if not to spare herself anything—“ he’s some sort of vicious moocher, though I can’t understand of what kind or why. When I spoke to you at my wedding, I thought that I was defending greatness and attacking its enemy . . . but it was in reverse . . . it was in such horrible, unbelievable reverse! . . . So I wanted to tell you that I know the truth .

This is a striking description for Dagny to think to herself of Cherryl, after just having talked to her:

She looked like a plant with a broken stem, still held together by a single fiber, struggling to heal the breach, which one more gust of wind would finish.

Just after talking to Dagny when she got home, the wind started to blow, when she realized Jim was with another woman there and:

what she was seeing now was evil for evil’s sake.

After a convo with him then, he ends up hitting her. The plant with a broken stem, broke completely. Soon afterwards when she left:

Then she ran, ran by the sudden propulsion of a burst of power, the power of a creature running for its life, she ran straight down the street that ended at the river— and in a single streak of speed, with no break, no moment of doubt, with full consciousness of acting in self-preservation, she kept running till the parapet barred her way and, not stopping, went over into space.

What is most striking about that, is she committed suicide as a means of self-preservation. What a tragic ending to such a wonderful girl.