herself up from the chair. Are you talking about
meat
? What depraved psychology prompts you to speak like this to the author of
Atlas Shrugged
?
This is our own Jeffrey Purcell, the headmaster said. As it was his story you chose, perhaps Jeffrey can be forgiven for thinking you agreed with his thesis.
Meat? She flapped her hand in front of her face. Enough, she said. I am quite finished.
The tall fellow came up with her cape and settled it on her shoulders as the admirers surged forward and the rest of us stood and stretched and began putting on our coats. All of us but one. Still waving his arm, Jaspers finally cried out, Miss Rand! Miss Rand! The room went quiet and she looked at Jaspers and he asked the question he’d been dying to ask. She jerked her head back as if she’d been slapped. All the dark-dressed men and women turned on him in utter loathing—a court of ravens about to eat the eyes out of this whey-faced, homesick boy with his chewed-up fingernails and puppyish need to be in on everything, who in his need had asked Ayn Rand the very question I had been itching to ask and probably would’ve asked if she hadn’t skunked me for mentioning Hemingway.
Who is John Galt?
SLICE OF LIFE
Who is John Galt?
By a joke of fate, the question that brought poor Jaspers into such disfavor turned out to be the very first line of
Atlas Shrugged,
as I discovered when I borrowed the book from our library a few days after Ayn Rand’s visit. I took a few runs at it but never got past the opening chapter. And when I returned to
The Fountainhead
I couldn’t read that either, not anymore.
The problem was that I could no longer read Ayn Rand’s sentences without hearing her voice. And hearing her voice, I saw her face; to be exact, the face she’d turned on me when I sneezed. Her disgust had power. This was no girlish shudder, this was spiritual disgust, and it forced on me a vision of the poor specimen under scrutiny, chapped lips, damp white face, rheumy eyes and all. She made me feel that to be sick was contemptible. There couldn’t have been any other reason for her to despise me so, not at that moment, before I’d offended her by mentioning Hemingway.
At first I wondered if I’d mistaken her expression, but she snuffed that small doubt with the look she gave our headmaster. Her revulsion was as naked as a child’s, and it continued to show itself in the cold, offended tone she used with him. It seemed that a wen was no less damnable than a runny nose. And this alone made it hard for me to read even the novel I’d been so captured by. I became touchily aware that both Roark and Dominique looked great and never had a sick day between them. Before now I’d taken their good looks for granted, like the ugliness of their archenemy Ellsworth Toohey. It hadn’t occurred to me that the author actually thought that an afflicted face was deserving of scorn.
Her heroes were hearty, happily formed, and didn’t have brats. In fact there were no brats at all in
The Fountainhead,
or in what little I read of
Atlas Shrugged.
The heroic life apparently left no time for children, or domestic cares, or the exertions of ordinary sympathy. After getting pinned by her look I couldn’t imagine Ayn Rand driving eight minutes, let alone eight hours, to nurse a sick relative. The same went for Dominique and Roark, who seemed to have no relatives, or even friends—only inferiors. For several weeks I’d measured other people against them, and other people had always come up short. Now I couldn’t read the novel without trying to imagine the two of them changing my sour sheets, walking me to the can. No dice. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in that sickroom. They wouldn’t have shown up at all.
The self-pity I felt at this betrayal dressed itself up as fierce affection for Grandjohn and Patty, who
had
done all this for me. I found myself defending them against Dominique and Roark as if they, not I, had turned up their
meat
? What depraved psychology prompts you to speak like this to the author of
Atlas Shrugged
?
This is our own Jeffrey Purcell, the headmaster said. As it was his story you chose, perhaps Jeffrey can be forgiven for thinking you agreed with his thesis.
Meat? She flapped her hand in front of her face. Enough, she said. I am quite finished.
The tall fellow came up with her cape and settled it on her shoulders as the admirers surged forward and the rest of us stood and stretched and began putting on our coats. All of us but one. Still waving his arm, Jaspers finally cried out, Miss Rand! Miss Rand! The room went quiet and she looked at Jaspers and he asked the question he’d been dying to ask. She jerked her head back as if she’d been slapped. All the dark-dressed men and women turned on him in utter loathing—a court of ravens about to eat the eyes out of this whey-faced, homesick boy with his chewed-up fingernails and puppyish need to be in on everything, who in his need had asked Ayn Rand the very question I had been itching to ask and probably would’ve asked if she hadn’t skunked me for mentioning Hemingway.
Who is John Galt?
SLICE OF LIFE
Who is John Galt?
By a joke of fate, the question that brought poor Jaspers into such disfavor turned out to be the very first line of
Atlas Shrugged,
as I discovered when I borrowed the book from our library a few days after Ayn Rand’s visit. I took a few runs at it but never got past the opening chapter. And when I returned to
The Fountainhead
I couldn’t read that either, not anymore.
The problem was that I could no longer read Ayn Rand’s sentences without hearing her voice. And hearing her voice, I saw her face; to be exact, the face she’d turned on me when I sneezed. Her disgust had power. This was no girlish shudder, this was spiritual disgust, and it forced on me a vision of the poor specimen under scrutiny, chapped lips, damp white face, rheumy eyes and all. She made me feel that to be sick was contemptible. There couldn’t have been any other reason for her to despise me so, not at that moment, before I’d offended her by mentioning Hemingway.
At first I wondered if I’d mistaken her expression, but she snuffed that small doubt with the look she gave our headmaster. Her revulsion was as naked as a child’s, and it continued to show itself in the cold, offended tone she used with him. It seemed that a wen was no less damnable than a runny nose. And this alone made it hard for me to read even the novel I’d been so captured by. I became touchily aware that both Roark and Dominique looked great and never had a sick day between them. Before now I’d taken their good looks for granted, like the ugliness of their archenemy Ellsworth Toohey. It hadn’t occurred to me that the author actually thought that an afflicted face was deserving of scorn.
Her heroes were hearty, happily formed, and didn’t have brats. In fact there were no brats at all in
The Fountainhead,
or in what little I read of
Atlas Shrugged.
The heroic life apparently left no time for children, or domestic cares, or the exertions of ordinary sympathy. After getting pinned by her look I couldn’t imagine Ayn Rand driving eight minutes, let alone eight hours, to nurse a sick relative. The same went for Dominique and Roark, who seemed to have no relatives, or even friends—only inferiors. For several weeks I’d measured other people against them, and other people had always come up short. Now I couldn’t read the novel without trying to imagine the two of them changing my sour sheets, walking me to the can. No dice. They wouldn’t have lasted five minutes in that sickroom. They wouldn’t have shown up at all.
The self-pity I felt at this betrayal dressed itself up as fierce affection for Grandjohn and Patty, who
had
done all this for me. I found myself defending them against Dominique and Roark as if they, not I, had turned up their
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