To Imagine A Heaven – And How “Sense of Life” Can Help You to Claim It

Tara Smith OCON July 2011 / Fort Lauderdale

Passages from & Others

A. Passages from Ayn Rand’s non-fiction: pp. 2-8 B. Passages from Ayn Rand’s fiction: pp. 8-12 C. Passages from other authors: pp. 12-13

Abbreviations & Editions Used:

Throughout, all emphases in originals

PSL = " & Sense of Life” (in ) AMT = “Art & Moral Treason” (in RM) ASL = “Art & Sense of Life” (in RM) PSA = “The Psycho- of Art" (in RM) A&C = “Art and Cognition” (in RM) Goal = “The Goal of My Writing” (in RM) DLG = “Don’t Let it Go” (in Philosophy: Who Needs It) MM = “The Metaphysical versus the Manmade” (in PWNI) CVD = “Causality vs. Duty” (in PWNI) TOE = "The Objectivist " (in The Virtue of Selfishness) Envy = “The Age of Envy” (in Return of the Primitive) Journals = Journals of Ayn Rand, ed. David Harriman, Plume/Penguin, 1997 Letters = Letters of Ayn Rand, ed. Michael S. Berliner, Plume/Penguin, 1995 OPAR = , : The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Penguin, 1991 NB: “Vacuum, speech, Zavarella” refers to Kara Zavarella’s transcription of Ayn Rand’s speech, “Our Esthetic Vacuum,” which is lengthier and somewhat different from the written version that was published in The Romantic Manifesto under the title, “The Esthetic Vacuum of Our Age.” Ayn Rand Answers – The Best of Her Q&A, ed. Robert Mayhew, Penguin, 2005 Objectively Speaking, eds. & Marlene Podritske, Lexington Books, 2009 Return of the Primitive – The Anti-Industrial Revolution, expanded edition of The New Left, ed. Peter Schwartz, Meridian, 1999

Editions of Ayn Rand’s works: The Romantic Manifesto, 1975, second revised edition Philosophy: Who Needs It, Bobbs-Merrill, 1982 The Virtue of Selfishness, Penguin, 1964 , 50th anniversary edition paperback, (originally published 1957) We the Living, New American Library/Penguin, 2009 (originally published 1936) “,” in The Early Ayn Rand, 1986. ______2

A. Passages from Ayn Rand’s Non-Fiction

1. “A sense of life is a pre-conceptual equivalent of , an emotional, subconsciously integrated appraisal of man and of existence. It sets the nature of a man’s emotional responses and the essence of his character. "PSL" p. 25

2. “Long before he is old enough to grasp such a concept as metaphysics, man makes choices, forms value-judgments, experiences emotions and acquires a certain implicit view of life. Every choice and value-judgment implies some estimate of himself and of the world around him—most particularly, of his capacity to deal with the world. He may draw conscious conclusions, which may be true or false; or he may remain mentally passive and merely react to events (i.e., merely feel). Whatever the case may be, his subconscious mechanism sums up his psychological activities, integrating his conclusions, reactions or evasions into an emotional sum that establishes a habitual pattern and becomes his automatic response to the world around him. What began as a series of single, discrete conclusions (or evasions) about his own particular problems, becomes a generalized feeling about existence, an implicit metaphysics with the compelling motivational power of a constant, basic emotion—an emotion which is part of all his other emotions and underlies all his experiences. This is a sense of life.” "PSL" pp. 25-26

3. “The integrated sum of a man’s basic values is his sense of life.” "PSL" p. 29

4. “A given person’s sense of life is hard to identify conceptually, because it is hard to isolate: it is involved in everything about that person, in his every thought, emotion, action, in his every response, in his every choice and value, in his every spontaneous gesture, in his manner of moving, talking, smiling, in the total of his personality. It is that which makes him a ‘personality.’” "PSL" p.31

5. “There are two aspects of man’s existence which are the special province and expression of his sense of life: love and art.” "PSL" p. 32

6. “The key concept, in the formation of a sense of life, is the term ‘important.’” "PSL" p. 28

7. “…A sense of life is not infallible. But a sense of life is the source of art, the psychological mechanism which enables man to create a realm such as art. "ASL" p. 35

8. “The emotion involved in art is not an emotion in the ordinary meaning of the term. It is experienced more as a “sense” or a “feel,” but it has two characteristics pertaining to emotions: it is automatically immediate and it has an intense, profoundly personal (yet undefined) value-meaning to the individual experiencing it. The value involved is life, and the words naming the emotion are: ‘This is what life means to me.’ "ASL" p. 35

9. “Regardless of the nature or content of an artist’s metaphysical views, what an art work expresses, fundamentally, under all of its lesser aspects is: ‘This is life as I see it.’ The essential meaning of a viewer’s or reader’s response, under all of its lesser elements, is: ‘This is (or is not) life as I see it.’ "ASL" p. 35

10. “And just as an individual who has never translated his sense of life into conscious convictions is in terrible danger—no matter how good his subconscious values—so is a nation.” "DLG" p. 252

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11. “A sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s control. One cannot tell what they depend on or require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them. One can lose or betray them without knowing it.” "DLG" pp. 256-257

12. “Emotional abstractions. An emotional abstraction consists of all those things which have the power to make one experience a certain emotion. For instance: a heroic man, the New York skyline, flying in a plane, a sunlit "stylized" landscape, ecstatic music, an achievement of which one is proud. (These same things will give an emotion of terror and guilt to a man with the wrong premises; all except the last, which is impossible to him.) An opposite example: a humble or depraved man, an old village or ruins, "walking on the moors," a desolate landscape, folk songs or atonal music, the failure of someone else's achievement or ambition. (The root and common denominator in all these things is self-esteem or lack of it; pro-man or anti- man; pro-life or anti-life.)” Journals, p. 714, April 28, 1965, on To Lorne Dieterling

13. lengthy passage: “The fundamental mistake in this question is its treatment of sense of life as if it were a conscious, rational conviction. I’ve always stressed that a sense of life is not a conviction, but an emotional sum arrived at subconsciously. This is why man cannot be guided by a sense of life alone; he is helpless without a conscious philosophy.

“You define your sense of life by introspection; however, if you’re interested in identifying your sense of life, you don’t start by defining it. Begin by defining the causes of your emotions. First learn to identify the exact nature of what you feel (and why) in any instance. Learn to be at home with your emotions. Learn to identify in conscious words (not approximately) what you feel and why. Once you’ve become acquainted with yourself emotionally—when there are no longer any great mysteries—then you can try to identify your sense of life. …

“You need not characterize your sense of life; what’s important is to ask yourself: “Are my subconscious ideas right or wrong? Do I consciously believe them, or have I made a mistake in my childhood?” and then translate your sense of life into conscious convictions. Once you’ve reached the point where you have identified the essentials of your sense of life, you’ll know you’re succeeding when there is no clash between your conscious convictions and your subconscious, sense of life emotions.

“How much detail is necessary? Sense of life doesn’t deal with details, just as emotions don’t. It deals with philosophical fundamentals. Therefore, if you know in sense of life terms what you feel about the nature of reality, cognition, man’s nature, and his morality, that’s sufficient to know your sense of life.

“In the light of what I’ve said, it is of course impossible to name the sense of life of fiction characters. You might name the sense of life of your closest friend—though I doubt it. You may, after some years, know approximately the sense of life of the person you love, but nobody beyond that. You cannot judge the sense of life of another person; that would be psychologizing. Judge their philosophical convictions, not whether their feelings match their ideas. That’s not for you to judge; it’s of no relevance to you.

“In art, you can say I like this artist’s sense of life, even though his conscious convictions are different or opposite. But then you’re not concerned with his psychology, but with the ideas expressed in his work. It’s impossible to tell the sense of life of a character of fiction. What you need to determine are his convictions—his basic views on life. … 4

“A novelist need not—and cannot—know the sense of life of his characters. He needs their conscious convictions.” Ayn Rand Answers – The Best of Her Q&A, pp. 185-187 ____

14. “That which some men hold in the form of a philosophical conviction, most men hold in the form of an emotion. Observe that under any specific, particular, momentary emotion you may experience, there is a deeper emotional undertone, a constant which seldom varies, a leitmotif so deeply rooted in your consciousness that you take it for granted and are seldom able to identify it. That is a metaphysical emotion. That is your basic estimate of yourself and of existence. That is your sense of life.” Vacuum, speech, Zavarella

15. “Ladies and Gentlemen. I shall begin by asking you a hypothetical question: Suppose that you were born and are now growing up in some miserable little village, lost in some trackless prairies, miles away from civilization. You have never seen anyone but a handful of dull, stagnant, brutalized people who spend their lives in the meaningless drudgery of the same routine of labor year after year with no interest, no purpose, no ambition beyond the range of their immediate needs. You are growing up with an incoherent, inarticulate sense of longing for something better, something beyond the meanness, the pettiness, the sordidness of the men around you. Whenever you are bewildered, disappointed, or hurt by people, whenever you encounter injustice and irrationality, you struggle to hang on to the formless hope that you will not surrender, that your life will have meaning, importance, and beauty, that you will reach something greater, somehow, somewhere, in some distant future. But you are not yet able to identify what that something is, you know it only in the form of a desperate emotion, and your torture comes from those moments when you wonder whether your undefined ideal can ever be achieved in reality, whether the men around you are right, whether a lethargic resignation to pain and ugliness is all that’s possible to man on earth. Now, suppose that your only contact with the rest of mankind is a movie theater where a film is shown once a month. It is your only chance to catch a glimpse of the world beyond your native village. Ask yourself: what will happen to you if that movie screen shows you , or if it shows you ten variants of your own village. Project the two alternatives: either you see New York with everything it implies, with the kind of intelligence, energy, courage, ambition that created it; or, you see the meanness, the sordidness, the futility, the despair of your own village, staring at you from the vacant eyes and loose faces and senseless lives of the men in other villages. What will either picture do to you. What will it do to your view of life, to your values, to your soul, to your future. If you understand the difference that these two alternatives would make to you, you understand the nature and the meaning of art in human existence.” Vacuum, speech, Zavarella

16. “…a sense of life always retains a profoundly personal quality; it reflects a man’s deepest values; it is experienced by him as a sense of his own identity.” "PSL" p. 31

17. “Cognitive abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is essential? (epistemologically essential to distinguish one class of existents from all others). Normative abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is good? Esthetic abstractions are formed by the criterion of: what is important?” "ASL" p. 36

18. “One of the distinguishing characteristics of a work of art (including literature) is that it serves no practical, material end, but is an end in itself; it serves no purpose other than contemplation—and the pleasure of that contemplation is so intense, so deeply personal that a man experiences it as a self- 5 sufficient, self-justifying primary and, often, resists or resents any suggestion to analyze it: the suggestion, to him, has the quality of an attack on his identity, on his deepest, essential self.” “PSA” p. 16

19. “the essence of art is integration, a kind of super-integration in the sense that art deals with man's widest abstractions, his metaphysics, and thus expands the power of man's consciousness.” “A&C” p. 76

20. “Man is a being of self-made soul – which means that his character is formed by his basic premises, particularly by his basic value-premises. In the crucial, formative years of his life – in childhood and adolescence – Romantic art is his major (and, today, his only) source of a moral sense of life. (In later years, Romantic art is often his only experience of it.)” “AMT” pp. 144-145

21. “It is not abstract principles that a child learns from Romantic art, but the precondition and the incentive for the later understanding of such principles: the emotional experience of admiration for man's highest potential, the experience of looking up to a hero—a view of life motivated and dominated by values, a life in which man's choices are practicable, effective and crucially important—that is, a moral sense of life.” “AMT” pp. 146-147

22. “This leads many people to regard a sense of life as the province of some sort of special intuition, as a matter perceivable only by some special, non-rational insight. The exact opposite is true: a sense of life is not an irreducible primary, but a very complex sum; it can be felt, but it cannot be understood, by an automatic reaction; to be understood, it has to be analyzed, identified and verified conceptually. That automatic impression—of oneself or of others—is only a lead; left untranslated, it can be a very deceptive lead. But if and when that intangible impression is supported by and unites with the conscious judgment of one's mind, the result is the most exultant form of certainty one can ever experience: it is the integration of mind and values.” "PSL" p. 32

23. “Love is a response to values. It is with a person's sense of life that one falls in love—with that essential sum, that fundamental stand or way of facing existence, which is the essence of a personality. One falls in love with the embodiment of the values that formed a person's character, which are reflected in his widest goals or smallest gestures, which create the style of his soul – the individual style of a unique, unrepeatable, irreplaceable consciousness. It is one's own sense of life that acts as the selector, and responds to what it recognizes as one's own basic values in the person of another. It is not a matter of professed convictions (though these are not irrelevant); it is a matter of much more profound, conscious and subconscious harmony.” "PSL" p. 32

24. “A sense of life, once acquired, is not a closed issue. It can be changed and corrected—easily, in youth, while it is still fluid, or by a longer, harder effort in later years. Since it is an emotional sum, it cannot be changed by a direct act of will. It changes automatically, but only after a long process of psychological retraining, when and if a man changes his conscious philosophical premises.” "PSL" p. 31

25. “Some sort of philosophical meaning, however, some implicit view of life, is a necessary element of a work of art. The absence of any metaphysical values whatever, i.e., a gray, uncommitted, passively indeterminate sense of life, results in a soul without fuel, motor or voice, and renders a man impotent in the field of art. Bad art is, predominantly, the product of imitation, of secondhand copying, not of creative expression.” "ASL" pp. 39-40 6

26. “Philosophy does not replace a man's sense of life, which continues to function as the automatically integrated sum of his values. But philosophy sets the criteria of his emotional integrations according to a fully defined and consistent view of reality (if and to the extent that a philosophy is rational). Instead of deriving, subconsciously, an implicit metaphysics from his value- judgments, he now derives, conceptually, his value-judgments from an explicit metaphysics. His emotions proceed from his fully convinced judgments. The mind leads, the emotions follow.” "PSL" pp. 29-30

27. “The subconscious is an integrating mechanism; when left without conscious control, it goes on integrating on its own …” “Comprachicos” p. 77

28. “I approach literature as a child does: I write—and read—for the sake of the story.” and lower on the same page: “My basic test for any story is: Would I want to meet these characters and observe these events in real life? Is this story an experience worth living through for its own sake? Is the pleasure of contemplating these characters an end in itself? It's as simple as that. But that simplicity involves the total of man's existence.” “Goal” p. 163

29. “A culture, like an individual, has a sense of life or, rather, the equivalent of a sense of life—an emotional atmosphere created by its dominant philosophy, by its view of man and of existence. This emotional atmosphere represents a culture's dominant values and serves as the leitmotif of a given age, setting its trends and its style.” “Envy” p. 130

30. In a letter to fan, in 1960: You ask me about the meaning of the dialogue on page 702 of Atlas Shrugged: "'We never had to take any of it seriously, did we?" she whispered. " 'No, we never had to.'" Let me begin by saying that this is perhaps the most important point in the whole book, because it is the condensed emotional summation, the keynote or leitmotif, of the view of life presented in Atlas Shrugged. What Dagny expresses here is the conviction that joy, exaltation, beauty, greatness, heroism, all the supreme, uplifting values of man's existence on earth, are the meaning of life—not the pain or ugliness he may encounter—that one must live for the sake of such exalted moments as one may be able to achieve or experience, not for the sake of suffering—that happiness matters, but suffering does not—that no matter how much pain one may have to endure, it is never to be taken seriously, that is: never to be taken as the essence and meaning of life—that the essence of life is the achievement of joy, not the escape from pain. … It is a matter of one's fundamental, overall attitude toward life—not of any one specific event. … What she felt, in that particular moment, was the confirmation of her conviction that an ideal man and an ideal form of existence are possible. Letters, pp. 583-584

31. “The use or misuse of his cognitive faculty determines a man’s choice of values, which determine his emotions and his character. It is in this sense that man is a being of self-made soul.” “MM” p. 32

32. “To the extent to which a man is mentally active, i.e., motivated by the desire to know, to understand, his mind works as the programmer of his emotional computer—and his sense of life develops into a 7 bright counterpart of a rational philosophy. To the extent to which a man evades, the programming of his emotional computer is done by chance influences. … if evasion or lethargy is a man’s predominant method of mental functioning, the result is a sense of life dominated by fear.” "PSL" p. 26

33. “If [man] chooses to live, a rational ethics will tell him what principles of action are required to implement his choice. If he does not choose to live, nature will take its course. Reality confronts a man with a great many ‘must’s,’ but all of them are conditional: the formula of realistic necessity is: ‘you must, if –’ and the ‘if’ stands for man’s choice: ‘if you want to achieve a certain goal.’” “CVD” pp. 118-119

34. “An organism's life is its standard of value: that which furthers its life is the good, that which threatens it is the evil.” “TOE” p. 17

35. “Value is that which one acts to gain and/or keep – virtue is the act by which one gains and/or keeps it. The three cardinal values of the Objectivist ethics—the three values which, together, are the means to and the realization of one's ultimate value, one's own life—are: Reason, Purpose, Self- Esteem, with their three corresponding virtues: Rationality, Productiveness, Pride.” “TOE” p. 27

36. “Even though such emotional abstractions grow into a metaphysical view of man, their origin lies in an individual’s view of himself and his own existence. The subverbal, subconscious criterion of selection that forms his emotional abstractions is: ‘That which is important to me’ or: ‘The kind of universe which is right for me, in which I would feel at home.’” “PSL” pp. 27-28

37. “A sense of life is the emotional counterpart of metaphysics; it is the metaphysics of the subconscious. You have heard the expression “a tragic sense of life” used by philosophers and estheticians; tragic is not the only possible attribute of that concept. There can be a tragic sense of life, or a benevolent sense of life, or a heroic sense of life, etc., according to one’s basic estimate. Those who hold a conscious, rational philosophy do not lose their sense of life, but their philosophy and their sense of life are integrated, unified into perfect harmony. They have no conflicts between their ideas and their emotions. Others whose conscious or subconscious premises are irrational may find themselves torn by the conflict between their ideas and their sense of life. Still others often have nothing but their sense of life to guide them. But whatever the case may be, all men possess and retain a sense of life. It is this aspect of man’s consciousness that is the special domain, the realm, the concern, and the source of art.” Vacuum, speech, Zavarella

38. “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments.” “A&C” p. 45 (also in "PSL")

39. “Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments. It is the integrator and concretizer of man's metaphysical abstractions. It is the voice of his sense of life.” "PSL" p. 33

40. “a chronic experience of disgust in looking at the state of one's society is not conducive to respect, mutual confidence or good will among men.” “Envy” p. 149

41. “an adolescent can ride on his sense of life for a while. But … a sense of life is not a substitute for explicit knowledge. Values which one cannot identify, but merely senses implicitly, are not in one’s 8 control. One cannot know what they depend on or require, what course of action is needed to gain and/or keep them.” “DLG” pp. 256-257

42. “As long as men believe that they are facing "misguided idealists" … confusion undercuts their will to resist, and intellectual self-defense is impossible. It is imperative to grasp that this is not the time for temporizing, compromising and self-deception. It is necessary fully to understand the nature of the enemy and his mentality.” “Envy” p. 157

43. “What is the weapon one needs to fight such an enemy? For once, it is I who will say that love is the answer—love in the actual meaning of the word, which is the opposite of the meaning they give it—love as a response to values, love of the good for being the good. If you hold on to the vision of any value you love—your mind, your work, your wife or husband, or your child—and remember that that is what the enemy is after, your shudder of rebellion will give you the moral fire, the courage and the intransigence needed in this battle. What fuel can support one's fire? Love for man at his highest potential.” “Envy” pp. 157-158

44. “Romantic art is the fuel and the spark plug of a man's soul; its task is to set a soul on fire and never let it go out. The task of providing that fire with a motor and a direction belongs to philosophy.” “AMT” p. 152

45. “In the flux of a child's countless impressions and momentary conclusions, the crucial ones are those that pertain to the nature of the world around him, and to the efficacy of his mental efforts. The words that would name the essence of the long, wordless process taking place in a child's mind are two questions: Where am I?—and: Is it worth it? “The child's answers are not set in words: they are set in the form of certain reactions which become habitual, i.e., automatized. He does not conclude that the universe is "benevolent" and that thinking is important—he develops an eager curiosity about every new experience, and a desire to understand it. Subconsciously, in terms of automatized mental processes, he develops the implicit equivalent of two fundamental premises, which are the cornerstones of his future sense of life, i.e., of his metaphysics and epistemology long before he is able to grasp such concepts consciously.” “Comprachicos” p. 57

46. “Observe also the intensity, the austere, the unsmiling seriousness with which an infant watches the world around him. (If you ever find, in an adult, that degree of seriousness about reality, you will have found a great man.)” “Comprachicos” pp. 54-55.

************************************ B. Passages from Ayn Rand’s Fiction from We the Living

47. Irina: "There's something I would like to understand. And I don't think anyone can explain it.... There's your life. You begin it, feeling that it's something so precious and rare, so beautiful that it's like a sacred treasure. Now it's over, and it doesn't make any difference to anyone, and it isn't that they are indifferent, it's just that they don't know, they don't know what it means, that treasure of mine, and there's something about it that they should understand. I don't understand it myself, 9

but there's something that should be understood by all of us. Only what is it? What?" (p. 332; Ayn Rand also cites this passage in her Foreword of 1958, p. ix)

48. Kira: "Now look at me! Take a good look! I was born and I knew I was alive and I knew what I wanted. What do you think is alive in me? Why do you think I'm alive? Because I have a stomach and eat and digest the food? Because I breathe and work and produce more food to digest? Or because I know what I want, and that something which knows how to want—isn't that life itself? And who—in this damned universe—who can tell me why I should live for anything but for that which I want? Who can answer that in human sounds that speak for human reason? ... But you've tried to tell us what we should want. You came as a solemn army to bring a new life to men. You tore that life you knew nothing about, out of their guts—and you told them what it had to be. You took their every hour, every minute, every nerve, every thought in the farthest corners of their souls—and you told them what it had to be. You came and you forbade life to the living. You've driven us all into an iron cellar and you've closed all doors, and you've locked us airtight, airtight till the blood vessels of our spirits burst! Then you stare and wonder what it's doing to us. Well, then, look! All of you who have eyes left—look!" (p. 385)

49. Andrei: "… I like to sit in a place where I have no reason to be, no reason but to sit and look at you across the table. Because I like those lights on your collar. Because you have a very stern mouth—and I like that— … suddenly I discover what it's like to feel things that have no purpose but myself, and I see suddenly how sacred a purpose that can be, so that I can't even argue, I can't doubt, I can't fight it, and I know, then, that a life is possible whose only justification is my own joy …." (p. 261)

50. Kira: “It's a rare gift, you know, to feel reverence for your own life and to want the best, the greatest, the highest possible, here, now, for your very own. To imagine a heaven and then not to dream of it, but to demand it." Andrei: “You’re a strange girl.” Kira: "You see, you and I, we believe in life.” (p. 101) ______from Atlas Shrugged

51. Dagny’s response to Francisco’s inexplicable change of character: “She survived it. She was able to survive it, because she did not believe in suffering. She faced with astonished indignation the ugly fact of feeling pain, and refused to let it matter. Suffering was a senseless accident, it was not part of life as she saw it. She would not allow pain to become important. She had no name for the kind of resistance she offered, for the emotion from which the resistance came; but the words that stood as its equivalent in her mind were: It does not count—it is not to be taken seriously. She knew these were the words, even in the moments when there was nothing left within her but screaming and she wished she could lose the faculty of consciousness so that it would not tell her that what could not be true was true. Not to be taken seriously – an immovable certainty within her kept repeating—pain and ugliness are never to be taken seriously.” (p. 113) 10

52. a description of Hank: “He felt a peculiar cleanliness. It was made of pride and of love for this earth, this earth which was his, not theirs. It was the feeling which had moved him through his life, the feeling which some among men know in their youth, then betray, but which he had never betrayed and had carried within him as a battered, attacked, unidentified, but living motor—the feeling which he could now experience in its full, uncontested purity: the sense of his own superlative value and the superlative value of his life. It was the final certainty that his life was his, to be lived with no bondage to evil, and that that bondage had never been necessary. It was the radiant serenity of knowing that he was free of fear, of pain, of guilt.” (p. 913)

53. from Galt's speech: “Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach. Check your road and the nature of your battle. The world you desired can be won, it exists, it is real, it is possible, it's yours. "But to win it requires your total dedication … Fight with the radiant certainty and the absolute rectitude of knowing that yours is the Morality of Life and that yours is the battle for any achievement, any value, any grandeur, any goodness, any joy that has ever existed on this earth.” (p. 979)

54. Dagny and Rearden discussing possibilities for his newly invented metal: “This was reality, she thought, this sense of clear outlines, of purpose, of lightness, of hope. This was the way she had expected to live – she had wanted to spend no hour and take no action that would mean less than this.” (p. 87)

55. Ragnar, explaining his and his wife’s attitude toward the dangers of his work: “‘She can live through it, Miss Taggart, because we do not hold the belief that this earth is a realm of misery where man is doomed to destruction. We do not think that tragedy is our natural fate and we do not live in chronic dread of disaster. We do not expect disaster until we have specific reason to expect it—and when we encounter it, we are free to fight it. It is not happiness, but suffering that we consider unnatural. It is not success, but calamity that we regard as the abnormal exception in human life.’" (p. 696)

56. Galt explaining to Dagny his display in his laboratory of a photograph of her, taken at the first run of the John Galt Line: "you were my symbol of what I wanted to achieve.’ He pointed at the picture. ‘This is how men expect to feel about their life once or twice, as an exception, in the course of their lifetime. But I— this is what I chose as the constant and normal.’ " (pp. 1001)

57. from Galt's speech: “Life is a process of self-sustaining and self-generated action. If an organism fails in that action, it dies; … its life goes out of existence. It is only the concept of 'Life' that makes the concept of 'Value' possible. It is only to a living entity that things can be good or evil.” (pp. 936-937)

58. of Hank & Dagny, on the night they first sleep together: “Through all the steps of the years behind them, the steps down a course chosen in the courage of a single loyalty: their love of existence … through the steps of shaping metal, rails and motors—they had moved by the power of the thought that one remakes the earth for one's enjoyment, that man's spirit gives meaning to insentient matter by molding it to serve one's chosen goal. The course led 11 them to the moment when, in answer to the highest of one's values, in an 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.” (p. 236)

59. on first seeing Dagny, Hank: “had forgotten where he was and on what errand, he was held by a child's sensation of joy in the immediate moment, by the delight of the unexpected and undiscovered, he was held by the astonishment of realizing how seldom he came upon a sight he truly liked, liked in complete acceptance and for its own sake, he was looking up at her with a faint smile, as he would have looked at a statue or a landscape, and what he felt was the sheer pleasure of the sight, the purest esthetic pleasure he had ever experienced.” (p. 520)

60. Hank, recalling his outburst to Dagny the morning after they first sleep together: “I damned the fact that joy is the core of existence, the motive power of every living being, that it is the need of one's body as it is the goal of one's spirit …” (p. 521)

61. Dagny observes that Hank and she share conviction that “Joy is the aim and the core of existence” (p. 87)

62. Hank’s knowledge that “joy is the goal of existence, and joy is not to be stumbled upon, but to be achieved” (p. 852)

63. Hank “had never loved his mills as he did in that moment, for – seeing them by an act of his own vision, cleared of all but his own code of values, in a luminous reality that held no contradictions – he was seeing the reason of his love: the mills were an achievement of his mind, devoted to his enjoyment of existence, erected in a rational world to deal with rational men.” (p. 904)

64. from Galt's speech: “Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values, … not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real. … Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.” (p. 935)

65. from Galt's speech: “the achievement of your happiness is the only moral purpose of your life” (p. 970)

66. from Galt's speech: “The purpose of morality is to teach you … to enjoy yourself and live” (p. 928)

67. Hank, thinking of the first time he saw Dagny: “He saw a girl standing on top of a pile of machinery on a flatcar. … Her posture had the lightness and unself-conscious precision of an arrogantly pure self-confidence. She was watching the work, her glance intent and purposeful, the glance of competence enjoying its own function. She looked as if this were her place, her moment and her world, she looked as if enjoyment were her natural state, … she seemed unaware of her body except as of a taut instrument ready to serve her purpose in any manner she wished.” (p. 519)

68. Midas Mulligan’s last day before disappearing, when, from a street vendor, he bought “a bunch of the year's first bluebells. His face was the happiest face she had ever seen; he had the look of a youth starting out into a great, unobstructed-vision of life lying open before him; the marks of pain and tension, the sediment of years upon a human face, had been wiped off, and what remained was 12 only joyous eagerness and peace. He picked up the flowers as if on a sudden impulse, and he winked at the old woman, as if he had some shining joke to share with her. He said, "Do you know how much I've always loved it—being alive?"” (p. 295)

69. During the first run of the John Galt Line, Dagny “looked at the crowd and she felt, simultaneously, astonishment that they should stare at her, when this event was so personally her own that no communication about it was possible, and a sense of fitness that they should be here, that they should want to see it, because the sight of an achievement was the greatest gift a human being could offer to others.” (p. 222)

70. Dagny “had never known a morning when she did not feel the rise of a quiet excitement that became a tightening energy in her body and a hunger for action in her mind – because this was the beginning of day and it was a day of her life.” (p. 508) ______from the play Ideal:

71. The actress Kay Gonda: “I want to see, real, living, and in the hours of my own days, that glory I create as an illusion. I want it real! I want to know that there is someone, somewhere, who wants it, too! Or else what is the use of seeing it, and working, and burning oneself for an impossible vision? A spirit, too, needs fuel. It can run dry.” (p. 280)

********************************* C. Passages from Other Authors:

Leonard Peikoff:

72. “…all men, whatever their conscious mental content, hold metaphysical value-judgments in a special form, which Ayn Rand calls a sense of life.” (OPAR, p. 426)

73. “From early childhood on, an individual continually makes choices and reaches conclusions in regard to concrete problems. These choices and conclusions, along with the feelings they engender, ultimately imply an abstract sum, a sense of oneself and the world. Since the mind is an integrating faculty, its contents have to be integrated; a conceptual consciousness—even a concrete-bound one— cannot escape making in some form broad generalizations about life.” (OPAR, p. 426)

74. “Art is inherently philosophical, even if those who create and respond to it are not. Art may not be philosophical explicitly, but it must be so implicitly; it must express some sense-of-life emotion. As and when necessary, this emotion can be identified in words; it can be translated into explicit metaphysical value-judgments. “Sense-of-life emotions, being products of a complex cause, can be difficult to identify; and most men regard emotions of any kind as outside the province of the mind. Hence the widespread view that artistic responses are inexplicable and that art is a species of the unknowable. In fact, however, sense- of-life emotions, like all others, are explicable—and alterable, if the facts of reality so demand. Like every phenomenon of human life, the realm of art is knowable—if one uses the human means of knowledge.” (OPAR, p. 427)

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75. “Personally and emotionally, I miss her benevolent sense of life; her strength of character; and her friendship and support through every crisis. I miss her as a person – quite apart from her knowledge – and I’d need a whole volume to explain that. ... she would project the power of being able to cope with anything, of being able to answer anything and solve anything. In her presence, you had to feel – at least, I felt – there is hope, there is a future, justice will triumph. That sense just radiated out of her…” (quoted in Objectively Speaking, p. 264) ______

Others:

76. Bliss Broyard, describing her father, the author and long-time literary critic for , Anatole Broyard:

“At parties at our house, I’d watch the way he moved through people, laying his hand on a shoulder, firmly gripping someone’s arm, and how they turned to him, their faces lit and expectant, as if he held a fistful of fairy dust over their heads, and he’d offer a word or two, nothing much, but with a subtext that declared, Aren’t we fantastic, you and me? Isn’t this world great? And because he was smart and observant, they believed him, and they answered back with a line that was extra funny and sharp, and he’d laugh and move on, and they’d turn around again and dig their heels a little deeper into themselves and think, yes, life is all right. It sure is.” (One Drop, Bliss Broyard, New York: Little Brown & Co., 2007, p. 60)

77. The mystery writer P.D. James, in her book Talking About Detective Fiction (Knopf, 2009), offers observations concerning the nature and appeal of mysteries:

The detective novel “is aimed above all at intelligence.” Its raison d’etre is the establishment of truth: whodunnit? Detective stories provide “the certainty that even the most intractable problems will in the end be subject to reason.” They are “unpretentious celebrations of reason and order.”

One of the secrets of Agatha Christie’s appeal, James writes, is that “all the problems and uncertainties of life are subsumed in the one central problem: the identity of the killer. And we know, that by the end of the book, this will be satisfactorily solved and peace and order restored…”

“In the detective story we have a problem at the heart of the novel, and one which is solved, not by luck or divine intervention, but by human ingenuity, human intelligence, and human courage. It confirms our hope that, despite some evidence to the contrary, we live in a beneficent and moral universe in which problems can be solved by rational means and peace and order restored from communal or personal disruption and chaos.”