Jim Syler’s Reviews > The Passion of Ayn Rand > Status Update

>That evening,Ayn exhibited a lack of human empathy that was astonishing.As Nathaniel, who conducted the conversation—it had the aura of a trial, except that the accused had no defense attorney—was pointing out the young woman's psychological deficiencies, he occasionally made some especially compelling point, succinct and well-phrased.Each time, Ayn chuckled with appreciation—and clapped her hands in applause.

>For Ayn, the use of her mind, the solving of the most complex of problems, was an effortless, joyous activity, it was the sole unchanging and permanent source of happiness in her life. To think, to see, to understand, to know, seemed to her as simple and uncomplicated as drawing breath; and the conclusions she reached seemed as clear and evident as the need to draw those breaths.

>He did not see the world as the bleak, irrational place that Ayn now considered it to be, and he searched desperately for reasons to give her hope, reasons to make her feel she was not living in the last days of the Roman Empire, reasons to convince her that there was more in the world around her than blank and corrupt mindlessness.

>there was no one to object to the attacks, no one to oppose them, no one with a public name, a public reputation, a public voice, to speak for her in that world which was vilifying her, to defend her, to fight for her, to name the nature and the stature of her accomplishment.

So insightful. I think that she's exactly right as to Rand's motivations here.

>We began to see each other frequently, and our relationship continued when our education took us to Los Angeles, as we struggled together to find a consistent view of a complex world, to find the answers to questions to which The Fountainhead had given us a key, but had not yet opened the door.

> "Dagny is myself, with any possible flaws eliminated," Ayn once said. "She is myself without my tiredness, without my chronic slightly anti-material feeling, without that which I consider the ivory tower element in me, or the theoretician versus the man of action. . . . Dagny is myself without a moment of exhaustion."

#keep

>The errors that set Dagny and Rearden in conflict with Galt and Francisco are what Ayn defined as errors of knowledge, not breaches of morality.

>"and all the years of ugliness and struggle were only someone's senseless joke." Those years would come to an end for Dagny, through the living reality of John Galt. But they were not to end for Ayn.

>"A man wears a moustache or beard," she would say, "because he wants to hide behind it; there's something he wants to conceal, not just a physical defect, but a spiritual defect; I would never trust such a man."