Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand [317]
“For what?”
“For what you’re trying so hard not to show. But don’t worry about me. I’m still able to stand it.... You know, I didn’t come here because I wanted to talk about myself or even about the trial.”
“I’ll agree to any subject you choose—in order to have you here.” He said it in the tone of a courteous joke; but the tone could not disguise it; he meant it. “What did you want to talk about?”
“You.”
Francisco stopped. He looked at Rearden for a moment, then answered quietly, “All right.”
If that which Rearden felt could have gone directly into words, past the barrier of his will, he would have cried: Don’t let me down-I need you—I am fighting all of them, I have fought to my limit and am condemned to fight beyond it—and, as sole ammunition possible to me, I need the knowledge of one single man whom I can trust, respect and admire.
Instead, he said calmly, very simply—and the only note of a personal bond between them was that tone of sincerity which comes with a direct, unqualifiedly rational statement and implies the same honesty of mind in the listener—“You know, I think that the only real moral crime that one man can commit against another is the attempt to create, by his words or actions, an impression of the contradictory, the impossible, the irrational, and thus shake the concept of rationality in his victim.”
“That’s true.”
“If I say that that is the dilemma you’ve put me in, would you help me by answering a personal question?”
“I will try.”
“I don’t have to tell you—I think you know it—that you are the man of the highest mind I have ever met. I am coming to accept, not as right, but at least as possible, the fact that you refuse to exercise your great ability in the world of today. But what a man does out of despair, is not necessarily a key to his character. I have always thought that the real key is in that which he seeks for his enjoyment. And this is what I find inconceivable: no matter what you’ve given up, so long as you chose to remain alive, how can you find any pleasure in spending a life as valuable as yours on running after cheap women and on an imbecile’s idea of diversions?”
Francisco looked at him with a fine smile of amusement, as if saying : No? You didn’t want to talk about yourself? And what is it that you’re confessing but the desperate loneliness which makes the question of my character more important to you than any other question right now?
The smile merged into a soft, good-natured chuckle, as if the question involved no problem for him, no painful secret to reveal. “There’s a way to solve every dilemma of that kind, Mr. Rearden. Check your premises.” He sat down on the floor, settling himself gaily, informally, for a conversation he would enjoy. “Is it your own first-hand conclusion that I am a man of high mind?”
“Yes.”
“Do you know of your own first-hand knowledge that I spend my life running after women?”
“You’ve never denied it.”
“Denied it? I’ve gone to a lot of trouble to create that impression.”
“Do you mean to say that it isn’t true?”
“Do I strike you as a man with a miserable inferiority complex?”
“Good God, no!”
“Only that kind of man spends his life running after women.”
.“What do you mean?”
“Do you remember what I said about money and about the men who seek to reverse the law of cause and effect? The men who try to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind? Well, the man who despises himself tries to gain self-esteem from sexual adventures —which can’t be done, because sex is not the cause, but an effect and an expression of a man’s sense of his own value.”
“You’d better explain that.”
“Did it ever occur to you that it’s the same issue? The men who think that wealth comes from material resources and has no intellectual root or meaning, are the men who think—for the same reason—that sex is a physical capacity which functions independently of one’s mind, choice or code of values. They think that your body creates a desire and makes a choice for you—just about in some such way as if iron ore transformed itself into railroad rails