“A faint glow streamed from behind the building into the sky, the reflection of thousands of unknown lights, the electric breath of the city. She wanted to rest. To rest, she thought, and to find enjoyment somewhere.
Her work was all she had wanted. But there were times, like tonight, when she felt that sudden, peculiar emptiness, which was not emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as if nothing within her were destroyed, but everything stood still. Then she felt the wish to find a moment’s joy outside, the wish to be held as a passive spectator by some work or sight of greatness. Not to make it, she thought, but to accept; not to begin, but to respond; not to create, but to admire. I need it to let me go on, she thought, because joy is one’s fuel.”—Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged
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“For a book of despair and revolution, it feels heavy in idealism,” Annie spoke in assessment of the writer and her style.
“One needs a heavy dose and true belief in ideals to resist and go to war against the mechanisms of the world,” James answered, “But what do you think of the end-piece: ‘I need it to let me go on…because joy is one’s fuel.’”
Annie considered, “I feel and understand that. I know the burnout when it isn’t there; and there’s nothing but yourself to keep you going, even when you don’t know why you do.”
“Me too.”
Sun set to the west behind streets of a false-Seville; an escape and novelty of niche in land of plain and pragmatic. What in modern development changed and deviated from the historical plain and purposeful, neither saw a better or more; but only a difference that was regarded as worthy simply for the novelty; but purposeless novelty, once seen for what it is, ceases to have novelty at all and becomes a resentment to those who must continue looking upon it after first-interest is lost.
So was the modern architecture of strip malls and climbing complexes; recognizable shapes fit to brands, and modern-architecture that accompanies nothing, simply taking up more space than it should at the cost and loss of utility and sensical design.
This was the architecture of modern prosperities developing open plains around the large-footprint city. It brought few new citizens, but moved those with money around so that, in wake, as metastasizing cancer, there were hard and lifeless places after that became eye sores and then social worries when masses and energies were moved.
But the false-Seville, in its archaic romance, held a footprint and survived—changing little—as the modernists and followers raced to ruin themselves.
“I think she’s right though,” James spoke in contemplation of the city surrounding, “and maybe we are running low on idealists; to keep it all going.”
“What do you mean?” Annie asked.
“Just that, we all have a breaking point; and the ideal of Rand’s immovable indefatigable, Ideal Man, is a construction of her fictions. It will not be the strong man that reshapes the natural drift and corruption of complacent and comfortable societies.
We think novelty—even that which is pure and total non-sense—is a virtue, simply for being different; and the further we drift from reason in following of false-virtues; the faster and more violent the fall.”
“What could happen?”
“I don’t know; but I believe—sooner than later—we’ll see.”
“And what becomes when there are no more movers?”
“The looters rule for a while; parasites that consume all—including themselves—and when it’s all gone to Hell—what Raynd misses and by her own determination refused to see—the Beatitude lives true.”
“Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth…
…Those who need and ask little, who never lost their simplicity and the fundamentals that enabled civilization to exist—they will begin again; back at a Stone Age beginning, when the fictions, too-far-drifted, fall.”
“What made you think of any of this?” Annie asked.
“Because I feel more of the passage in me: the emptiness that isn’t emptiness, just a silence that rests wrong; the immobility—where are we going, what is our course, what is our end—and having no answer, just a dread for the direction; a hope for something beautiful and inspiring, but all the world pushes is an ugliness—a unity preached as a cultural religion while tearing down faith in God’s; removing all but the false idols of powerful and ruinous men who detract one’s own faith and self-determination and preach submission to a mass that has no cognizance, only a momentum seized from stilled and submitting souls.”
A quiet fell, an uneasiness. Though she desired not to think, to consider, in unspeaking core—Annie knew the passage too.
Sky over false-Seville burned in evening flame that soon would die; and then would come night, a black removed of stars, suppressed wash, and bleached of inspiration in banality of urban energies.