PLOT
While on her way to Utah, Dagny awakens after midnight to find the train is "frozen". She walks to a phone accompanied by Owen Kellogg. After making arrangements for the train, she rents a plane at a nearby airfield and flies to Utah. She lands in Afton just after Daniels departs in a plane with another person. Dagny chases the plane to an uninhabited region of Colorado. The chapter ends as her plane is going down in a crash.
SUBPLOT (loose ends)
Dagny spares the life of a tramp by inviting him to dine with her in private.
During dinner, the tramp (Jeff Allen) tells a story about a John Galt he knew and the demise of the 20th Century Motor Company.
The engineer on the frozen train was Pat Logan.
Owen Kellogg gives Dagny a pack of cigarettes bearing the sign of the dollar.
Dagny tells Owen to make sure: Eddie gives Mr. Allen a job, get the train to Laurel, and call Hank Rearden.
Owen is also supposed to call Winston, Colorado and tell them Dagny will be there tomorrow by noon.
COMMENTS
Mr. Allen – Dagny spares his life because "his eyes were observant", the collar of his shirt "was bone-white from repeated laundering" and he "tightened his grip on a small, dirty bundle – the gesture of a sense of property". Dagny ends up giving him a job. Is this “charity” (unearned)? Where is the value for value?
Profit – Dagny asks Owen why he was willing to help her if he is a deserter. "Because there isn’t a passenger on that train who needs to get where he’s going more urgently than I do. If the train can be started, none will profit more than I." It sounds like he has a huge business deal in the works. Owen ends up telling Dagny his plans: "For a month’s vacation with some friends". And it’s "more important than anything on earth." Vacations are profitable?
Dollar sign – Owen gives a speech similar to Francisco’s about the uniqueness of the United States. Owen fictitiously states the sign of the dollar comes from the initials for the US. (The bottom part of the "U" was eventually removed.) Owen states, "It stands on the vest of every fat, piglike figure in every cartoon, for the purpose of denoting a crook, a grafter, a scoundrel – as the one sure-fire brand of evil. Do you know that the United States is the only country in history that has ever used its own monogram as a symbol of depravity?" Can a country have a moral code?
Gold – Owen tells Dagny she can’t afford to pay for the package of cigarettes. The cost is five cents – in gold. As we heard Francisco say, gold is an objective value, unlike paper. "Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce." (AS 2:2) Clearly Owen is next to Francisco on the scale...wherever that is.
John Galt - The following things were said about John Galt by Jeff Allen:
"...but something within him had been reached and his response was this confession, this long, desperate cry of rebellion against injustice, held back for years, but breaking out in recognition of the first person he had met in whose hearing an appeal for justice would not be hopeless."
"He stood like a man who knew that we was right. I will put an end to this, once and for all, he said."
"We began to think that he had kept his word, that he, who had seen and known the truth we refused to know, was the retribution we had called upon our heads, the avenger, the man of that justice which we had defied."
Dagny - As she was flying after Quentin Daniels, the following description was written:
"From the transparent green of ice, the sky melted into pale gold, and the gold spread into a lake under a fragile film of pink glass, the color of that forgotten morning which was the first she had seen on earth." (The sky looked the same on this day as it did on the day of Dagny's physical birth.)
Control - Rand describes how expertly Dagny piloted the plane and then how expertly she landed it. Then Rand described the taxiing of the plane in the passive voice: "...she felt the jolt of the wheels stopping it in time, then the streak of her motion ebbing out and the plane being taxied to the safety of a car, as it taxied smoothly off the runway." Rand usually takes care to use the active voice to describe the expert actions of the "good guys", but here she described the plane being taxied rather Dagny taxiing the plane. This description is what it feels like when a person masters a skill.
Do you see this "mastered and automated motor skill" and all other automated motor skills as the same? If not, how are they different?
The answer to the above question explains how Francisco achieved what Dagny thought was his greatest accomplishment in the previous chapter, as well as foreshadows the secret to the first two chapters of Part III...
There is a step different between the two and it occurs between the active and passive voice in the passage for a mastered skill and it does NOT occur during an automated skill that is "habit"...and it is the principle behind the motor. Let's look at this another way...
If I'm driving a car during winter and I'm in Drift, when I hit a patch of ice, I move to Focus and in that moment that I grab control of the steering wheel, I'm off the road, and possibly dead.
If I'm driving the same car in Focus, when I hit a patch of ice, I move to Ease/Serenity and "with a somnabulist's unerring skill" I steer into the skid and come out of it safe before I consciously know what has happened.
So the answer to this question is the difference between death or life; the difference between slapping Dagny and not slapping Hank.
PRACTICAL APPLICATION (worth rereading)
The entire meeting between Dagny and Mr. Allen is worth rereading. In fact, it looks as if the first 19 chapters were written solely to put the story of the 20th Century Motor Company in perspective. She uses the Twentieth Century Motor Company as the model for why socialism is bad. Notice her explanation is more spiritual than material! Ms. Rand has completed the "framing" of her model. All of the themes are mentioned in depth and are interconnected. I won’t go through all of them, just the highlights.
"Only I think that it’s a sin to sit down and let your life go, without making a try for it." "The tramp’s last sentence was one of the most profoundly moral statements she had ever heard." We all consume. Production (life) is achieved through value for value. If a person doesn’t have motion, they have no value. Without value they consume more than they produce. Consuming more than you produce is the definition of a dishonest person according to Francisco (2:2).
"Hadn't we always been told that this was righteous and just?" Mr. Allen shows that "Right and Just" are the standard. He is stating socialism looks to be the standard on the surface. However, we will see if a person chooses to think, they would realize it is not "right and just". Mr. Allen's story shows if we don't learn by thinking (understanding), then we will learn by experience.
"From each according to his ability, to each according to his need. When it’s all in one pot, you can’t let any man decide what his own needs are, can you? If you did, he might claim that he needs a yacht – and if his feelings is all you have to go by, he might prove it, too." No objective standards. No logic. Emotions vs. thinking.
"It took us just one meeting to discover that we had become beggars. We began to hide whatever ability we had." They became moochers who focused on demonstrating negative value, not ability.
"There wasn’t any ‘amusement allowance’ for anybody. Any man who played it straight, had to refuse himself everything. He lost his taste for any pleasure." People lost their passion. They lost the source of energy fueling achievement (growth). They started physically retaliating against those who got things. They started wishing the elderly and sick would die. It doesn’t sound like a very compassionate society.
"A moral law, they called it, which punished those who observed it – for observing it. The more you tried to live up to it, the more you suffered; the more you cheated it, the bigger reward you got. Within one year under the new plan, there wasn’t an honest man left among us." Honesty, love, and Grace have vanished.
"What is it that hell is supposed to be? Evil - plain, naked, smirking evil, isn't it? Well, that's what we saw and helped to make - and I think we're damned, every one of us, and maybe we'll never be forgiven..." Now, Mr. Allen shows the plan actually results in evil...in hell...and the people who embrace this may be beyond forgiveness. (Wow, pretty spiritual stuff!)
"Was there anybody who got any profit from it? There was. The Starnes heirs." This doesn’t sound like interdependence. Actually, the workers are now dependents.
"The worker who liked the idea that his need entitled him to a limousine like his boss’s, forgot that every bum and beggar on earth would come howling that their need entitled them to an icebox like his own." They didn’t see the big picture and look long term.
At the meeting that kicked off the plan twelve years ago, "He stood like a man who knew that he was right. ‘I will put an end to this, once and for all,’ he said. ‘I will stop the motor of the world.’ You see, his name was John Galt." It looks like a group who tried to put in place "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need", resulted in a man named John Galt quitting.
Why did the bum tell Dagny the story? "...but something within him had been reached and his response was this confession, this long desperate cry of rebellion against injustice, held back for years, but breaking out in recognition of the first person he had met in whose hearing an appeal for justice would not be hopeless. It was as if the life he had been about to renounce were given back to him by the two essentials he needed: by his food and by the presence of a rational being."
The whole story seems far-fetched. Is it possible one person would believe this enough to try and implement it? Is it possible anyone living in the good ole USA even believes this philosophy is viable? Book Two is titled, "Either-Or". We just saw one choice: socialism. What is the "OR"?
SUPPLEMENT
"Many Americans are similarly ignorant about our Constitution – so much so that a third of the people who were asked the origin of the statement, ‘From each according to his ability and to each according to his need,’ responded by saying it’s from our Bill of Rights."
"Bertman says that Americans cannot preserve our free institutions and build a better society if we’ve forgotten liberty’s value and price. We cannot recognize that liberty is rare, precious and easily lost if we’ve forgotten the words and meaning of the documents under which the American experiment was founded. We cannot wisely choose between fighting or not fighting a war if we’ve forgotten war’s human costs become oblivious to the historical necessity of giving one’s life in order to preserve a way of life." ("America’s Amnesia", W. Williams 5/16/01)
Nuclear Physicist – A man came up to a former boss of mine and thanked him for giving him a job ten years ago. The man reminded the boss he had approached the boss ten years ago for a job and the boss’ response was, “I don’t have any openings, but you look like a hard worker, so I’ll find something." The man said he would have quit college if the boss hadn’t given him that job, because he was out of money. The man graduated and went to MIT for graduate school. Now he works for NASA as a nuclear physicist. Was this “charity” (an unearned gift)?
Ayn references the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna (~150 AD) - "Who was that philosopher, she thought, who preached that motion exists without any moving entities? This was his world, too."
Next Chapter: Atlantis
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