PLOT
Dwight Sanders retires after buying the United Locomotive Works, still leaving TT without any new engines. Because of the Equalization of Opportunity Bill, Hank sells his iron mine to Paul Larkin and his coal mines to Ken Danagger. Public opinion is against the John Galt Line because of the "hazards" of Rearden Metal. However, people who denounce Rearden Metal are buying TT stock in other people’s names. There’s an overabundance of crew volunteers for the first ride on the John Galt Line. The first ride is a success with Hank and Dagny on board. On the night of the first ride, Dagny and Hank have sexual intercourse at Ellis Wyatt’s place.
SUBPLOT (loose ends)
Eddie in confessional – Eddie, who has taken over for Dagny, admits he is afraid.
Dagny desires a man – "To find a consciousness like her own, who would be the meaning of her world, as she would be of his…No, not Francisco d’Anconia, not Hank Rearden, not any man she had ever met or admired…"
An unidentified person appears outside her new office. She later confirms it was not Hank.
Wesley Mouch resigns and becomes the Assistant Coordinator of the Bureau of Economic Planning and Natural Resources. Hank works with Eddie to extend payment terms from TT for the rails.
COMMENTS
Scale – James hopes for bad news on the John Galt Line. He has moved to –6. Hank’s interactions with Paul Larkin and Ken Danagger are enlightening. His feelings for Larkin: "He (Hank) had never experienced an emotion of this kind. It took him a few moments to realize that this was what men called hatred." Larkin may not be in the middle of the scale any more. "When he sold his coal mines to Ken Danagger, Rearden wondered why he felt as if it were almost painless." Danagger shows himself to be Hank’s equal and maybe superior during their deal making. Put Ken at +7. Ellis Wyatt’s says during dinner with Dagny and Hank, "I’ve never had a chance to be what I’m like – except tonight." Wyatt gives Dagny and Hank energy, although he seems to challenge Dagny more. Ellis is at +8.
Value for Value – Hank: "Either I own a property or I don’t." Hank believes trust is useless because it doesn’t follow value for value. Why should he logically expect something from someone who doesn’t benefit? Because he should trust him?
Public opinion – The positive side of the scale doesn’t care for public opinion. What is public opinion? "People said it because other people said it." The negative side seems to be obsessed with public opinion. Consequently, the people who report public opinion, the press, end up on the negative side of the scale as an occupational hazard. "The reporters…were young men who had been trained to think that their job consisted of concealing from the world the nature of its events."
The Cause - This chapter is completely focused on how the intangible (spirit, soul, ideas, principles) are the cause and the effect is the tangible - and the ONLY way to determine meaning is to first get this causal relationship right!
"What is it we hear over the telephone - sound vibrations, isn't it? Well, her voice sounds as if it were turning into light vibrations - if you know what I mean."
"...that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal."
"First, the vision - then the physical shape to express it. First, the thought - then the purposeful motion down the straight line of a single track to a chosen goal. Could one have any meaning without the other?"
"In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless. Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?". The motors were a moral code cast in steel."
"They are alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going...-the power of a living mind - the power of thought and choice and purpose."
"Tell me, Miss Taggart, what's going to support a seven-thousand-ton train on a three-thousand-ton bridge?"
"My judgment," she answered.
Here are a some excerpts where Dagny wondered about the evil beliefs from her enemies:
"Was this the surrender of man's spirit to his body?"
"...who made them? The brute force of men's muscles?"
"...it's a physical sensation of physical movement through space...but is that the cause and the meaning of what I now feel?...Do they call it a low, animal joy - this feeling that I would not care if the rail did break to bits under us now - it won't - but I wouldn't care, because I have experienced this? A low, physical, material, degrading pleasure of the body?"
Spiritual Issues - This novel is completely focused on the intangible spirit as the cause! Remember this passage? "...that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal." (Ayn used the word "spirit" to refer to what we now realize is the mind/soul.)
The comments that led up to it include:
-"Only when one feels immensely important, she had told him, can one feel truly light."
-"First, the vision - then the physical shape to express it. First, the thought - then the purposeful motion down the straight line of a single track to a chosen goal. Could one have any meaning without the other?"
-"Was this the surrender of man's spirit to his body?"
-"Every part of the motors was an embodied answer to "Why?" and "What for?". The motors were a moral code cast in steel."
-"-the power of a living mind - the power of thought and choice and purpose."
Sex: We now have five examples of sex and each corresponds to a thought process!
-Evasion/Evil - Hank and Lillian. This is where a person uses sex to control/humiliate the other person.
-Drift/Animal - James and Betty. This is indiscriminate, sex with any person.
-Focus/Human - Dagny and Francisco. This is sex with a specific person.
-Serenity/Ease - Dagny and Hank in chapters previous to this one. For example, during their meeting in chapter four, Dagny and Hank connect by first analyzing the WHY behind every step and then work each other up into a frenzy imagining all the future benefits Rearden Metal will bring. Ayn's description of Dagny's feelings in that scene were "post-coital". Dagny and Hank had moments where they were completely themselves with each other and both were energized, without any physical contact. Do you even consider this to be sex?
Flow is alternating between the conscious and unconscious brain - between Focus and Serenity. (See PRACTICAL APPLICATION for more details.) This leads to the fifth type of sex!
-Flow - Focus/Human Sex AS AN EFFECT of Serenity/Ease Sex. This is the best sex a person can ever experience and a person can never get used to this. It is sex with the mind as a cause and sex with the body as an effect:
"There was some unbreakable link between her love for her work and the desire of her body; as if one gave her the right to the other, the right and the meaning; as if one were the completion of the other – and the desire would never be satisfied except by a being of equal greatness."
When people are dating, they tend to have moments of Serenity/Ease Sex. The problem is as soon as they have Focus/Human Sex, they stop pursuing Serenity/Ease Sex and only participate in Focus/Human Sex as a cause, which people can get used to.
PRACTICAL APPLICATION (worth rereading)
Ayn's best description of Flow was presented during the first run of the John Galt Line: Everything from the beginning of the section ("The green-blue rails ran to meet them...") to Rearden saying, "That's that."
Flow is when you do something giving you so much energy you wish you could continue doing it AND hours end up feeling like minutes. We will cover Flow in much more detail during later chapters, so I won't go through the entire description here. For now, notice Flow involves:
-"a strange foreshortening of time"
-"a joyous sense of confidence"
-"being conscious of nothing but the pleasure it gave her"
The final paragraph of the chapter is also worth rereading because it completely links the mind and the body: "...as there was no division between body and spirit."
and we've already seen,
"...that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal."
and,
"The course led them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, in admiration not to be expressed by any other form of tribute, one's spirit makes one's body become the tribute, recasting it --- as proof, as sanction, as reward --- into a single sensation of such intensity of joy that no other sanction of one's existence is necessary."
SUPPLEMENT
"Modern people are always saying, ‘Sex is nothing to be ashamed of.’ They may mean two things. They may mean 'There is nothing to be ashamed of in the fact that the human race reproduces itself in a certain way, nor in the fact that it gives pleasure.' If they mean that, they are right. Christianity says the same. It is not the thing, nor the pleasure, that is the trouble. The old Christian teachers said that if man had never fallen, sexual pleasure, instead of being less than it is now, would actually have been greater. I know some muddle-headed Christians have talked as if Christianity thought that sex, or the body, or pleasure were bad in themselves. But they were wrong. Christianity is almost the only one of the great religions which thoroughly approves of the body – which believes that matter is good, that God Himself once took on a human body, that some kind of body is going to be given to us even in Heaven and is going to be an essential part of our happiness, our beauty and our energy. Christianity has glorified marriage more than any other religion: and nearly all the greatest love poetry in the world has been produced by Christians. If anyone says that sex, in itself, is bad, Christianity contradicts him at once. But of course, when people say, 'Sex is nothing to be ashamed of,' they may mean 'the state into which the sexual instinct has now got is nothing to be ashamed of.' If they mean that, I think they are wrong." (CSL-MC)
Table of Contents
Next Chapter: The Sacred and the Profane
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