Thoughts from the Train Tracks

by doughnutmanifesto

“If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down on his shoulders – what would you tell him to do?”

“I don’t know. What… could he do? What would you tell him?”

“To shrug.”

                                                                                     – Atlas Shrugged, page 422

          

You know you went a little into Ayn Rand’s characters that when you got stuck in heavy traffic in EDSA, you wondered, “What would Dagny Taggart do?”

Dagny Taggart is a railroad executive. The Vice President of Operations with infallible judgment who places workability on top of pleasing people. You would when your moral oath is “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”. She looks at people for their ability and nothing else. For her, granting a job out of pity or out of plain need is a bull. You would when your axiom is “The motors were a moral code cast in steel”.

Set in the Industrial Age backdrop, Atlas Shrugged is a plot painting the consequences when the best of minds and abilities go on strike. Strikes are naturally about the poor, the inflicted, and the ‘underdogs’ holding their manpower off until they get what they think is fair. But just what happens when the makers and owners of machines do it with their mind power? This book questions “by what rights, by what standards, by what honor” do we deem things good or moral. It establishes the essence of Objectivism – that man is an end in himself. It is controversial for it stands on the principles of Objective Reality, Reason, Self-Interest, and Capitalism. (Yes, Corporate Social Responsibility, taxes, Medicare, and dole outs are big NOs to Rand.)

Her philosophies are enunciated at length through clever utilization of the characters and their clash of characters, to let Objectivism own the spotlight, mocking the way I know, or hope to know, how the world works.

Objectivism rejects any form of determinism, the belief that man is a victim of forces beyond his control (such as God, fate, upbringing, genes, or economic conditions), of mysticism (any acceptance of faith of feeling as a means of knowledge), and skepticism (the claim that certainty or knowledge is impossible).

Dagny Taggart is assisted in her executive post by Eddie Willers whom she had known since childhood and would turn out to have feelings for her as the plot thickens. Her brother Jim holds the position of President and whose worldview differs from her as nightime is to daytime. He is chum with the people in politics known as ‘Washington Boys’ and would go out of his ways to please them. Jim is portrayed as someone who sets out to destroy greatness, would love to see it crumbles into pieces, but gets frustrated he cannot defy the absolute any time. He also goes for causeless emotions, for him, love is an end in itself. He is to find that his wife, Cheryl, is his nemesis in principles. In their argument which led to the demise of the latter, Rand showed how Jim looked out for love:

“So 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 do or have or say or think. For myself – not for my body or mind or words or works or actions”.

“But then… what is yourself?”

“If you loved me, you wouldn’t ask it.” His voice had a shrill note of nervousness, as if he were swaying dangerously between caution and some blindly heedless impulse. “You wouldn’t ask. You’d know. You’d feel it. Why do you always try to tag and label everything? Can’t you rise above those petty materialistic definitions? Don’t you ever feel – just feel?”

“Yes, Jim. I do”, she said, her voice low. “But I am trying not to, because… what I feel is fear.”

“Of me?” he asked hopefully.

“No, not exactly. Not fear of what you can do, but of what you are.”

He dropped his eyelids with the swiftness of slamming a door – but she caught a flash of his eyes and the flash, incredibly, was terror. “You are not capable of love, you cheap little gold-digger!” he cried suddenly, in a tone stripped of all color but the desire to hurt. “Yes, I said gold-digger. There are many forms of it, other than greed for money, other and worse. You’re a gold-digger of the spirit. You didn’t marry me for my cash – but you marry me for my ability or courage or whatever value it was that you set as the price of your love!”

“Do you want… love… to be… causeless?

 “All of you welfare preachers – it’s not unearned money that you’re after. You want hand outs, but of a different kind. I’m a gold-digger of the spirit, you said, because I look for value. Then you, the welfare preachers… it’s the spirit that you want to loot. I never thought and nobody ever told us how it could be thought of and what it could mean – the unearned in spirit. But that is what you want. You want unearned love. You want unearned admiration. You want unearned greatness. You want to be a man like Hank Rearden without the necessity of being what he is. Without the necessity of being anything. Without the necessity… of being.”

In stark contrast to how Dagny does:

“Do you still need proof that I’m always waiting for you?” she asked, leaning obediently in her chair; her voice was neither tender nor pleading, but bright and mocking.

“Dagny, why is it that most women would never admit that, but you do?”

“Because they’re never sure that they ought to be wanted. I am.”

“I do admire self-confidence.”

“Self-confidence was only one part of what I said, Hank.”

“What’s the whole?”

“Confidence of my value – and yours.”

                                                                                                     —

Reading Atlas Shrugged is like writing with a non-dominant hand. Finishing it left me with an aspiration to be adept, if not conscientious, with that hand, if only to achieve the possibility of relishing the masterful. Surreal is when I read it aboard PNR (Philippine National Railways) on a Sunday afternoon – sort of made me wonder if it would feel the same as reading Titanic aboard a ship. I looked around PNR terminal and remembered this structure had been in operation for a hundred years and I was reading a 50^th anniversary edition of Atlas Shrugged. The chugging train sounded differently, if to my ears or to something else, I could not elaborate. I wondered how its first operation struck the mind of the people some hundred years ago and how it differs now, with the state of indifference casted at the machinery.

I am curious as to what creative process Ayn Rand had to go through to have delivered a tremendous in scope a prose. Great puns too:

               “When I die, I hope to go to heaven – whatever the hell that is – and I want to be able to afford the price of admission.”

               “They remained silent in an elevator, the clicks of the flashing numbers above the door marking their downward progress.”

I read her bio and I saw her psyche animated through Dagny and her experiences to the setting. She was from a bourgeoisie family who went through tough times. Her use of the dollar sign in the novel as the insignia of free and able men was a homage to America, a country she loved so much for its love of reason, liberty, and prosperity that she emigrated from Russia. As for the relationship department, she entered a polygamous relationship with the consent of all parties involved. Implicitly like Dagny in the book, what with John Galt, Hank Rearden, and Francisco D’Anconia – powerful men of abilities and values – proclaiming adulation to Dagny and tolerant of and among each other’s presence.

There is no background story about Dagny’s parents. Their presence is not talked much about, especially the father’s. Dagny is the type who does not accept favor and never gives any kind of it. A voice in my head went, “Oh sure, when you are born with silver spoon in your mouth”. But as the story unfolds and John Galt finally came in the third and last part of the book, his is the same philosophy. Only he is a self-made man, born without pedigree and was orphaned. Galt’s childhood was not mentioned, all of the characters’ actually, except Dagny’s, Jim’s, and Francisco’s – and even not at length – which further emphasized Objectivism’s rejection of determinism, here, in the aspect of childhood and upbringing.

As I reached three hundred or so pages, I wondered how it would be adapted in movie and how Richard Halley’s concertos would sound like. Someone told me there is actually a two-part movie and You Tube led me to the concertos, with several channels offering suggestions as to what it ‘should’ sound like. I watched the trailer and heard a portion of a concerto but I was not as arrested as to the immensity the book holds. But of course, I have to put into consideration that I haven’t seen and heard the entirety just yet.

While reading Atlas Shrugged may not convert one into an Objectivist overnight, I found myself silently questioning the philosophies I had held, had accepted, and had seen around me. For some days, I labored to follow Dagny’s beautiful kind of numb. It takes a lot of emotions to be numb indeed, or rather to appear numb just because it is foreign to have a face that does not register fear, pain, or guilt – a liberating experience. That nothing in this world could hurt, extort, or make you go against your own judgment and reason – such gift. And in the inside, you know, life force will not be foreign to you anymore. You are free to be creative, productive, joyful… with all the rights earned to the title, ‘human’.