Atlas Shrugged [555]
"People think that a liar gains a victory over his victim. What I've learned is that a lie is an act of self-abdication, because one surrenders one's reality to the person to whom one lies, making that person one's master, condemning oneself from then on to faking the sort of reality that person's view requires to be faked. And if one gains the immediate purpose of the lie-the price one pays is the destruction of that which the gain was intended to serve. The man who lies to the world, is the world's slave from then on- When I chose to hide my love for you, to disavow it in public and live it as a lie, I made it public property-and the public has claimed it in a fitting sort of manner. I had no way to avert it and no power to save you. When I gave in to the looters, when I signed their Gift Certificate, to protect you-I was still faking reality, there was nothing else left open to me-and, Dagny, I'd rather have seen us both dead than permit them to do what they threatened. But there are no white lies, there is only the blackness of destruction, and a white lie is the blackest of all. I was still faking reality, and it had the inexorable result: instead of protection, it brought you a more terrible kind of ordeal, instead of saving your name, it forced you to offer yourself for a public stoning and to throw the stones by your own hand. I know that you were proud of the things you said, and I was proud to hear you-but that was the pride we should have claimed two years ago.
"No, you did not make it worse for me, you set me free, you saved us both, you redeemed our past. I can't ask you to forgive me, we're far beyond such terms-and the only atonement I can offer you is the fact that I am happy. That I am happy, my darling, not that I suffer. I am happy that I have seen the truth-even if my power of sight is all that's left to me now. Were I to surrender to pain and give up in futile regret that my own error has wrecked my past-that would be the act of final treason, the ultimate failure toward that truth I regret having failed. But if my love of truth is left as my only possession, then the greater the loss behind me, the greater the pride I may take in the price I have paid for that love. Then the wreckage will not become a funereal mount above me, but will serve as a height I have climbed to attain a wider field of vision. My pride and my power of vision were all that I owned when I started-and whatever I achieved, was achieved by means of them. Both are greater now, Now I have the knowledge of the superlative value I had missed: of my right to be proud of my vision. The rest is mine to reach.
"And, Dagny, the one thing I wanted, as the first step of my future, was to say that I love you-as I'm saying it now. I love you, my dearest, with that blindest passion of my body which comes from the clearest perception of my mind-and my love for you is the only attainment of my past that will be left to me, unchanged, through all the years ahead. I wanted to say it to you while I still had the right to say it. And because I had not said it at our beginning, this is the way I have to say it-at the end. Now I'll tell you what it was that you wanted to tell me-because, you see, I know it and I accept: somewhere within the past month, you have met the man you love, and if love means one's final, irreplaceable choice, then he is the only man you've ever loved."
"Yes!" Her voice was half-gasp, half-scream, as under a physical blow, with shock as her only awareness. "Hank!-how did you know it?"
He smiled and pointed at the radio. "My darling, you used nothing but the past tense."
"Oh . . . !" Her voice was now half-gasp, half-moan, and she closed her eyes.
"You never pronounced the one word you