The morning after Dagny and Hank have sex, they discuss what it meant to each of them. Hank and Dagny meet that night at Dagny’s place. On September 2, Hank goes to a dinner in his honor given by the National Council of Metal Industries and then Hank decides he and Dagny should take a few weeks of vacation. While on vacation, they decide to find the 20th Century Motor Company in order to get machines for Ted Nielsen who has agreed to make Dagny’s engines. The 20th Century Motor Company is deserted except for the remnants of a motor able to turn static energy into kinetic energy.
SUBPLOT (loose ends)
Ragnar strikes a ship headed for Norway with Emergency Gift cargo.
James "celebrates" the victory of the John Galt Line by bringing a dime store clerk up to his room. He decides not to have sex with Cherryl Brooks.
Hank wants to know the other man Dagny has been with.
Mr. Mowen fumes about the unfairness of business conditions to a day laborer, Owen Kellogg.
The Legislature passed a Bill giving wider powers to the Bureau of Economic Planning and Natural Resources.
COMMENTS
Scale – Cherryl is hard to pin down. She talks like the positive side of the scale, but her seeming lack of intelligence allows James to convince her about the negative side. We learn more about Jim just like we learned about Hank, Dagny, and Francisco: "He did not name to himself the nature of his own feeling - never to identify his emotions was the only steadfast rule of his life; he merely felt it..." "The unnamed and the unuttered could not clash into a contradiction." "...unhappiness is the hallmark of virtue. If a man is unhappy, really, truly unhappy, it means that he is a superior sort of person." James is moving beyond –6 with his responses to all the positive side accomplishes. He is becoming more emotionally unstable.
Story Arc - Dagny sees the calendar says it is September 2 (one year has passed since the beginning of the book) and we have completed the story arc begun at the beginning of the book concerning the Rio Norte Line. At the beginning, Dagny needed to replace the Rio Norte Line. During this chapter, the John Galt Line becomes the new name for the Rio Norte Line. The rest of the chapter sets up the next story arc: Dagny and Hank go on a vacation and find the remnants of a revolutionary motor in the abandoned Twentieth Century Motor Company headquarters in Wisconsin.
Absolutes – "There are no absolutes – as Dr. Pritchett has proved irrefutably. Nothing is absolute. Everything is a matter of opinion." (James to Cherryl) The inability to communicate without using absolutes proves the existence of absolutes.
Thought Processes - This chapter is CRUCIAL to understand in order to get the rest of the novel. The reason "experts" can't explain this novel in a non-contradictory fashion all comes down to this one chapter! I believe it is very important to take some time to get some background before moving on.
The key is to realize the first eight chapters were PROLOGUE. In order to understand this, let's compare this novel with what I believe is the second best novel ever written.
Atlas Shrugged is 1,100 pages divided into three Parts.
Les Misérables is 2,783 pages divided into five Parts.
The musical version of Les Misérables debuted in 1985 and ran until 2003, making it the fifth longest running Broadway musical of all time. (It was second when it closed. It is the longest running musical in London's West End.) It was nominated for twelve Tony's and won eight including Best Musical.
Part One of that novel is covered by the first four songs in the musical.
Prologue: Work Song
Prologue: On Parole
Prologue: Valjean Arrested, Valjean Forgiven
Prologue: What Have I Done?
The Title Card is then presented declaring the beginning of the story because everything before was considered prologue: "a separate introductory section of a literary or musical work."
Likewise, the first eight chapters of Atlas Shrugged can be seen as prologue. In fact, here is a possible song list for the prologue of Atlas Shrugged the musical.
Prologue: Who is John Galt? (Introduce the setting, characters, and their motivations)
Prologue: One Month (Eddie and Dagny remembering summers with Young Francisco)
Prologue: The Chain (The Anniversary Party)
Prologue: The John Galt Line (Hank and Dagny have sex and the Title Card announces the beginning of the story)
When you think of Les Misérables the musical, how much of the time do you think of the first four songs? Probably not much. Likewise, these first eight chapters ought to occupy the same amount of thought.
The main reason this is the most critical chapter is six characters change their "default thought process" during chapter 9! If you continue to keep the first eight chapters in mind, your interpretation of these six characters will be wrong.
When looking at people, it is important to keep TWO scales in mind relative to thought processes.
Adaptation: This is the thought process a person is in at the moment.
Habituation: This is the thought process the person goes to for "happiness".
For example, we saw Francisco was habituated to Focus, however, when he slapped Dagny he had gone from Drift to Evasion in the moment and he was not "happy". Another way to look at this is teenage boys tend to habituate to Drift; they are "happy" when they isolate and play video games. You can get them to Focus in the moment; you can have a direct conversation on one topic, however, they won't be "happy" during the conversation.
Many experts have a hard time explaining the actions taken by the following characters because they think the character had the same habituated thought process during the first eight chapters as they have from this point on. Here is a list of the characters changing their habituated thought process during chapter nine:
1. Hank (from Drift to Focus) is a caricature of the conscious Focus thought process! This is also known as the "human" thought process: guilt, depravity, purpose, reason, etc.
2. Dagny (from Focus to Drift) is a caricature of the Drift thought process! This is also known as the "animal" thought process and Dagny uses the word "animal" to describe herself as well as not feeling any guilt.
The chapter ends with Hank experiencing Focus Tension ("tortured moan") and Dagny experiencing Drift Release ("her laughter").
The organization celebrating Rearden, and the woman at the first house near the 20th Century Motor factory are also at Drift.
3, 4, and 5. Mr. Mowen, Orren Boyle, and James have gone from Drift to Evasion. Ayn's description of James' habituation to the Evasion thought process is excellent. James is only "happy" when he thinks about bad things happening to others.
6. Cherryl is at Focus and gets taken to Drift by James who is at Evasion. James felt "the superiority of having put something over on her." This is half of the reason James was attracted to Cherryl. What is the other half of the reason?
Flow - The vacation Dagny and Hank take is an example of Flow! The description of each person outside of the car is Focus Hank and Drift Dagny. However, the description while they are in the car is a toggle between Hank (conscious brain) and Dagny (unconscious brain)! The first sentence:
"The earth went flowing under the hood of the car."
Flow actually occurs by toggling between the Focus thought process and the Ease thought process. The discovery of the motor is Ease. Here is a list of how a person would respond, according to each thought process, in response to being told to invent the greatest thing in their area of expertise:
-Evasion: lash out at others
-Drift: go through the motions at the job site
-Focus: work as hard as possible at the job site
-Ease: LEAVE THE JOB SITE to find the answer
Ease always appears serendipitous to people not in Flow. "Wow, they discovered the greatest technology in the world while they were on vacation! Who would have thought?"
ALL the moments in this novel where a character FEELS a Truth but can't consciously explain it are examples of Ease/Serenity and Flow!
Here's a link to an article explaining Flow: Flow/toggle is the ONLY healthy thought process.
From the article:
"The problem is that excessive focus exhausts the focus circuits in your brain. It can drain your energy (Drift) and make you lose self-control (Evasion). This energy drain (Drift) can also make you more impulsive and less helpful (Evasion)."
Also, the article stated Flow/toggle is "the essence of leadership".
PRACTICAL APPLICATION (worth rereading)
Guilt – Not only this chapter, but any mention of guilt in previous chapters is worth rereading. Notice who feels guilty and who feels guiltless. More importantly, notice the circumstances surrounding these feelings. Guilt is the biggest source of pain; it’s self-inflicted. If your job is the source of your stress, you only have to deal with it 8-10 hours a day. If you cause yourself stress, there’s no escaping it. You can’t avoid yourself. Guilt leads to pain, and pain leads to fear.
Contradictions – Previously, we saw contradictions don’t exist. In fact, they are proof at least one assumption must be wrong. "The unnamed and the unuttered could not clash into a contradiction." Now we see why it’s so important to name an issue and why people on the negative side of the scale don’t want to name issues or talk about them. It proves they are wrong. Silence is VERY telling.
Hank's Morality - One of the controversial topics arises in this chapter: How could Hank have an affair with Dagny when he said he would never break a contract?
Some people respond Hank wouldn't break a contract, therefore his affair with Dagny is unrealistic. Others want to say this is proof Hank is becoming more immoral because it is the first contract he broke.
Again, this is clearly a contradiction and the title of Part I is "Non-Contradiction". Your response to this contradiction will prove your thought process. Take a moment and determine how you would attack this contradiction.
Here are the premises:
-Marriage is a contract
-Hank is married to Lillian
-Hank had an affair with Dagny
Take a moment and decide what you believe about each premise and state it out loud (or write it down) before following this link to get the in depth answer: Hank's Infidelity.
SUPPLEMENT
"For the trouble is that one part of you is on His (God’s) side and really agrees with His disapproval of human greed and trickery and exploitation. You may want Him to make an exception in your own case, to let you off this one time; but you know at bottom that unless the power behind the world really and unalterably detests that sort of behavior, then He cannot be good. On the other hand, we know that if there does exist an absolute goodness it must hate most of what we do. That is the terrible fix we are in."
"If the universe is not governed by an absolute goodness, then all our efforts are in the long run hopeless. But if it is, then we are making ourselves enemies to that goodness every day, and are not in the least likely to do any better tomorrow, and so our case is hopeless again. We cannot do without it, and we cannot do with it. God is our only comfort, He is also the supreme terror: the thing we most need and the thing we most want to hide from."
"Of course, I quite agree that the Christian religion, is in the long run, a thing of unspeakable comfort. But it does not begin in comfort; it begins in the dismay I have been describing, and it is no use at all trying to go on to that comfort without first going through the dismay. In religion, as in war and everything else, comfort is the one thing you cannot get by looking for it. If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end. If you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth – only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin with and, in the end, despair." (CSL-MC)
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