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Atlas Month—The Glory of Man Submitted by Stephen Boydstun on Mon, 2007-10-01 22:11
I first read Atlas Shrugged in fall term of 1967. I was a sophomore at college. During the summer, I had read The Fountainhead, my first exposure to Rand’s fiction and Rand’s ideas. (Page numbers before the semicolon are for the paperback Signet edition of Atlas; those after are for the first edition of the Random House hardback.)
Immediately, I liked: Dagny (20–25; 12–18) Rearden (33–38; 26–32) Francisco (93–112; 94–113) Galt (652–55; 702–5) My favorite scenes are four:
1. The First Run of the John Galt Line “The lights, hanging on a signal bridge against the sky, were green. There were green lights between the tracks, low over the ground, dropping off into the distance where the rails turned and a green light stood at the curve, against leaves of a summer green that looked as it they, too, were lights.” (228; 239) –to– “She watched the bridge growing to meet them—a small, square tunnel of metal lace work, a few beams criss-crossed through the air, green-blue and glowing, struck by a long ray of sunset light from some crack in the barrier of mountains. . . . She heard the rising, accelerating sound of the wheels—and some theme of music, heard to the rhythm of the wheels, kept tugging at her mind, growing louder. . . .” (236; 247) 2. The Crash into the Valley and the Awakening to Galt in Full Sunlight “She was back at the wheel, she was speeding down the runway, she was rising into the air, her plane like a bullet aimed at two low sparks of red and green light that were twinkling away into the eastern sky.” (646; 693) –to– “. . . as if his faculty of sight were his best-loved tool and its exercise were a limitless, joyous adventure, as if his eyes imparted a superlative value to himself and to the world—to himself for his ability to see, to the world for being a place so eagerly worth seeing. . . . as if he, too, were seeing the long-expected and the never-doubted.” (652; 701–2) 3. John and Dagny, Each to Each “Then she stopped. It was his eyes and hair that she saw first. . . . She saw John Galt among the chain gang of the mindless. . .” (885; 954) –to– “. . . that nothing more could be desired, ever.” (888; 957) 4. The Deliverance of Rearden “Silence was his only sensation, as he sat at the wheel of his car, speeding back down the road to Philadelphia. It was the silence of . . .” (916; 987) –to– “The glare of steel being poured from a furnace shot to the sky beyond the window. A red glow went sweeping slowly over the walls of the office, over the empty desk, over Rearden’s face, as if in salute and farewell.” (927; 999) My favorite philosophical passage is: “By the grace of reality and the nature of life, man—every man—is an end in himself, he exists for his own sake, and the achievement of his own happiness is his highest moral purpose.” (941; 1014)
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 The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
 Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand
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Essays
Seventeen months ago, I wrote here a précis of Rand’s basics of ethics as displayed in The Fountainhead compared to her basics of ethics as developed further in Atlas Shrugged. Yesterday I received the book Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. One contribution in this collection is by Darryl Wright. The title of Professor Wright’s essay is “Ayn Rand’s Ethics: From The Fountainhead to Atlas Shrugged.” This essay alone is worth the price of the book. Get this book.
From the conclusion of Wright’s essay:
“What can we say overall about the development of Ayn Rand the moral philosopher in the period spanning the publication of her two greatest novels? The theme that runs through each of the topics we have considered is our profound need of morality. It is her conclusion that we would need morality even on a desert island that prompts her shift from taking independence to taking rationality as the primary virtue. It is her recognition of the indispensability of moral ideals that motivates her concern with spiritual exploitation and her critique of altruism. And it is her quest for the deepest philosophical justification of the thesis that we need morality to live that drives her to one of her most important insights—that the very idea of ‘value’ is inconceivable apart from the concept and phenomenon of life.”
In tracing Rand’s development of her ethics between ’43 and ’57, Wright uses the two novels themselves, but in addition, he uses (i) Rand’s draft material for a non-fiction work not completed, titled The Moral Basis of Individualism, and (ii) Rand’s notes for Atlas. Notice, when you read Wright’s essay, how Rand is rising above the Greeks in her rise in ethical theory from Fountainhead to Atlas.
The Notes Flowed Up
Rachmaninoff Prelude Op.23 No.2
Books about Atlas Shrugged
Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, edited by Robert Mayhew
Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, edited by Edward W. Younkins
(To bring up Essays on Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged, click on the link above, then click on Catalog/Book Search, then enter Robert Mayhew in the Author field.)
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In the list in the Reflections note below, the link for “Live Consciousness” should be: Live Consciousness. Thanks to William Scherk for the tip.
Also, I should add the following to the Reflections list:
“Odysseus, Jesus, and Dagny” by Susan McCloskey
ABSTRACT
“Epic literature celebrates a culture's noblest sense of what it means to be human, and records the human actions and attributes it deems worthy of contemplation and emulation. To show the depth and striking originality of Ayn Rand's conception of human greatness, Dr. McCloskey compares Atlas Shrugged with Homer's Odyssey as an expression of Greek values and with the Gospels as an expression of Christian values. In fascinating and insightful analyses of Dagny Taggart, Francisco d’Anconia, Hank Rearden, and John Galt, McCloskey shows how Rand both used and transformed the epic tradition in literature.” (Audio PSA-OA016W)
Emotional fuel
Thanks for compiling this, Stephen. It is especially helpful at this time.
Jim
Reflections
"And I Like that Idea Very Much" by Eve V. Stenson
Radiant Greed
To Think or Not
Grasping "Existence Exists"
Live Consciousness
Need People?
Virtue
From Fountainhead to Atlas
Eddy
Eddy and Kira
Existence Is Identity
One Obligation
Aristotle
Plato
Sartre
"Who Is Dagny Taggart?" by Charles Wieder
Yes, this is timeless beauty
Yes, this is timeless beauty which so rarely has been achieved before AS. Somehow, when I read Atlas I always hear second and third piano concerto by Rachmaninov. I wonder why?
Marvelous
This is a gift, Stephen. Your selection of quotes gave me a spiritual boost. Thanks.
= Mindy
Philosophy of Romantic Fiction
“Atlas Shrugged as the Culmination of the Romantic Novel.”
Prof. Bernstein will discuss “the philosophy of romantic fiction as he analyzes, compares, and contrasts Hugo's Les Miserables, Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov, and Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged.”
Wheeling Jesuit University Event - 9/30/08
A Spring Day
“Little notes of music trembled in hesitation, and burst, and rolled in quick, fine waves, like the thin, clear ringing of glass. Little notes leaped and exploded and laughed, laughed with a full, unconditional, consummate human joy.
. . .
“At dawn, she fell on the edge of a slope. She lay very still, for she knew she would not rise again.
“Far down, below her, an endless plain stretched into the sunrise. . . .
“A lonely little tree stood far away in the plain. It had no leaves. Its slim, rare twigs had gathered no snow. It stretched, tense with the life of a future spring, thin black branches, like arms, into the dawn rising over an endless earth where so much had been possible.”
We the Living (1936)
“The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. . . .
“The lights of the valley fell in glowing patches on the snow still covering the ground. There were shelves of snow on the granite ledges and on the heavy limbs of the pines. But the naked branches of the birch trees had a faintly upward thrust, as if in confident promise of the coming leaves of spring.”
Atlas Shrugged (1957)
“. . . a spring day in 1957; we were walking up Madison Avenue toward the office of Random House, which was in the process of bringing out Atlas Shrugged. She was looking at the city she had always loved most, and now, after decades of rejection and bitter poverty, she had seen the top publishers in that city competing for what she knew, triumphantly, was her masterpiece. She turned to me suddenly and said: ‘Don’t ever give up what you want in life. The struggle is worth it.’. . . . I can still see the look of quiet radiance on her face.”
---Leonard Peikoff (1987)
Artistic Inventiveness
Andrew Bernstein writes that the novel “is an art form that can transport a reader from a character’s innermost private thoughts to the most grand-scale, globe-shaking physical conflict—and dramatize the causal link between the two.” He gives a literary analysis of the novel Atlas Shrugged in the current issue of The Objective Standard [2(3):47–66], which arrived today. The title of this study is “Transforming the Novel: The Literary Revolution in Atlas Shrugged.” The elements addressed are plot-theme, integrative techniques (symbolism, irony, recasting Greek mythology, juxtaposition of opposites), and characterization.
See also: The Art of Fiction ~ Ayn Rand
T. Boeckmann, editor (Plume 2000)
New Nobilities
“In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. Do not lose your knowledge that man’s proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads. Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not-at-all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish . . .” (AS 1069; cf. 637, 812–13)
“But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away your love and hope! You still feel noble . . . . I knew noble people who lost their highest hope . . . . But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul!” (Z 30–31)
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“My brothers, we need a new nobility, which is the adversary of all rabble and all despotic rule and which writes anew the word ‘noble’ on new tablets. . . . Not where you come from shall constitute your honor from now on, but instead where you are going! Your will and your foot, which wants to go over and beyond yourself—let that constitute your new honor!” (Z 162–63)
“He had a caste system of his own: to him, the Taggart children were not Jim and Dagny, but Dagny and Eddie. . . . Eddie asked him once, ‘Francisco, you’re some kind of very high nobility, aren’t you?’ He answered, ‘Not yet’.” (AS 90)
Z – Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Adrian Del Caro, translator (Cambridge 2006).
Atlas contra God
Rand introduces her most fundamental axiom on page 1015 of Atlas Shrugged (hb). That is the assertion existence exists. As she introduces the axiom, she says that the moral code that she is overturning and replacing attempts to escape the axiom existence exists. She has already said that the code she means to overturn comes in a variety based on dictates of a supernatural being known as God (1011-12). One of the purposes of Rand's axiom existence exists is to foreclose the possibility of the existence of God.
In her later essay "The Metaphysical v. The Man-Made" (1973), she tells us that her axiom "existence exists" means that the universe exists independently of consciousness (24) and that the universe as a whole "cannot be created or annihilated, that it cannot come into or go out of existence" (25). She says that her fundamental axiom invalidates the question "If there is no God, who created the universe?"
Immediately after introducing the axiom existence exists in AS, Rand introduces axioms concerning consciousness, which are corollaries of grasping the statement existence exists. These are "that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists" (1015). This characterization of consciousness and self-consciousness rules out the possibility of God as a mind existing before the existence of anything else. "A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something" (1015). In these strokes, not only God is swept away. Idealism (Berkleyian, transcendental, or metaphysical), Cartesian skepticism, and materialism (non-existence of mind) are also out of court. (See also, page 1027 and "For the New Intellectual" [1960].)
Readers here know that Rand articulated another axiom: