The Journals of Ayn Rand (8 page)

He has a brilliant sense of humor. Rather a cruel, sardonic kind of humor. Being conscious of his superiority to the rest of mankind, he cannot help seeing their absurd, ridiculous, idiotic smallness. He has no respect for anything; therefore he can laugh at everything and approach all things lightly, with an attitude of superior disdain. His mind is brilliant enough to see the ridiculous side of everything. He gets immense enjoyment from shocking people, amusing them with his cynicism, [ridiculing] before their eyes the most sacred, venerated, established ideas. He takes a real delight in opposing people, in fighting and terrifying them. He has no ambition to be a benefactor or a popular hero for mankind. [...] Subconsciously, this is the result of a noble feeling of superiority, which knows that to be loved by the mob is an insult and that to be hated is the highest compliment it can pay you.

He is born with a wonderful, free, light consciousness—[resulting from] the absolute lack of social instinct or herd feeling. He does not understand,
because he has no organ for understanding,
the necessity, meaning or importance of other people. (One instance when it is blessed not to have an organ of understanding.) Other people do not exist for him and he does not understand why they should. He knows himself—and that is enough. Other people have no right, no hold, no interest or influence on him. And this is not affected or chosen—it’s
inborn,
absolute, it can’t be changed, he has “no organ” to be otherwise. In this respect, he has the true, innate psychology of a Superman. He can never realize
and feel
“other people.” (That’s what I meant by thoughts as feelings, as part of your nature.) (It is wisdom to be dumb about certain things.)

[William Edward] Hickman said: “I am like the state: what is good for me is right.” That is this boy’s psychology. (The best and strongest expression of a real man’s psychology I ever heard.) The model for the boy is Hickman. Very far from him, of course. The outside of Hickman, but not the inside. Much deeper and much more. A Hickman with a purpose. And without the degeneracy. It is more exact to say that the model is not Hickman, but what Hickman suggested to me.

The boy is a perfectly straight being, unbending and uncompromising. He cannot be a hypocrite. He shows how impossible it is for a genuinely beautiful soul to succeed at present; for in all [aspects of] modern life, one has to be a hypocrite, to bend and tolerate. This boy wanted to command and smash away things and people he didn’t approve of. He could not compromise with that which he despised and knew he had a right to despise. All life is compromising, at present. A man that could not compromise.

At the end, when his last appeal has been refused and the execution awaits him, he throws away all protective hypocrisy and shouts to his jailers and the newspaper reporters what he thinks of the world. It must be the essence, the very heart of the book: his wild, ferocious cry. It must be the strongest speech ever uttered in condemnation of the world. It must strike people like a whip slapping them in the face. It must be scalding in its bloody suffering, like the yell of an animal with an open, torn wound.

He has a wonderful “sense of living.” He realizes that he is living, he appreciates every minute of it, he wants to
live
every second, he is unable to exist as other men do. He doesn’t take life for granted and live as he happens to be living—just calm, satisfied, normal. For him, life [must be] strong, high emotion; he has to live “on top,” “breathing” life, tense, exalted,
active.
He cannot spend eight hours each day on work he despises and does not need. He cannot understand men spending their lives on some work and not liking that work, not doing with it what they please. He knows that he wants to live and that the whole damn world hasn’t the right to deprive him of it!

He doesn’t have people’s attitude toward life, that is, the general way of existing calmly day to day and [experiencing] something strong and exalting only once in a while, as an exception.
“Everyday life ”does not exist for him.
His normal state is to be exalted, all the time; he wants
all
of his life to be high, supreme, full of meaning.

All this is unconscious in him. He cannot reason it out and explain it. It’s unconscious, because it’s innate, it’s his natural state of mind, it’s organic in him, and he cannot realize it, because he cannot quite understand the common attitude toward life, which is too monstrous for his Superman’s consciousness [to grasp].

He half-consciously realizes that he possesses something sublime, and that he is going to be condemned for possessing it. From this—his tense, wild, ferocious attitude.

Most people lack [the capacity for]
reverence
and
“taking
things seriously. ” They do not hold anything to be very serious or profound. There is nothing that is sacred or immensely important to them. There is nothing—no idea, object, work, or person—that can inspire them with a profound, intense, and all-absorbing passion that reaches to the roots of their souls. They do not know how to value or desire. They cannot give themselves entirely to anything. There is nothing
absolute
about them. They take all things lightly, easily, pleasantly—almost indifferently, in that they can have it or not, they do not claim it as their absolute necessity. Anything strong and intense, passionate and absolute, anything that can’t be taken with a snickering little “sense of humor”—is too big, too hard, too uncomfortable for them. They are too small and weak to feel with all their soul—and they disapprove of such feelings. They are too small and low for a loyal, profound reverence—and they disapprove of all such reverence. They are too small and profane themselves to know what sacredness is—and they disapprove of anything being too sacred.

The boy is just their opposite. He is all passion, will, and uncompro mised absolutes. He takes everything seriously. Life is very serious and sacred to him. And, as Nietzsche said: “The noble soul has reverence for itself.” He has a profound reverence for himself, a determination to keep himself and his life clean, untouched, and beautiful, because they are the most sacred of all sacred things. And when he wants something—he wants it.

The tragedy of a man with the consciousness of a god, among a bunch of snickering, giggling, dirty-story-telling, good-timing, jolly, regular fellows.

All this is quite unconscious in the boy. He does not and cannot recognize it. He is too much of an “outsider” to understand the “inside.” He understands only enough to hate and despise it, as only he can hate and despise.

The boy has a marvelous, fascinating laugh. I must describe it in the beginning of the story, as Danny’s introduction: a clear, ringing laugh, the laugh of an unhesitating, unquestionable joy, the laugh of a sunny soul, the laugh of the real life itself. That laugh must show more than anything else what that boy is and what they are destroying.

The probable story: he is unjustly hurt and deeply insulted by a popular, “respectable” pastor, who is a condensed representative of the “little street.” [The injustice is such] that it damages, if not ruins, his life and career. He murders the pastor, as a revenge. The public is horrified, for the pastor was a very popular, “beloved” figure. The crime takes the aspect of a blow against the church, religion, civilization, humanity, etc. “The greatest crime ever...”

The boy is alone against all of society. He is everybody’s personal, hated enemy. He is caught, tried, and condemned to death. He escapes from jail. He is recognized on the outskirts of the town by a sneaky little man with a shiny old coat, protruding chin, tobacco-stained yellow lips and bad teeth. He is surrounded by a mob and lynched. Torn to pieces, beaten to death on the pavement with the water of the gutter running red.

The story ends with Hetty, the girl who loved him, going to a grocery store on a rainy November evening, sent by her mother to buy some hamburger and ten cents worth of chopped pickles.

And the last cry of the story, as the girl looks at the little street:

“I’m afraid, Mother, I’m afraid!”

 

A clear,
straight
soul. Like the “Prince-Flower.” [AR may be referring to a Grimms’ fairy tale,
The Carnation,
in which a beautiful girl is turned temporarily into a flower by a prince.] Very sensitive. Lonely. Not a strong, ambitious career woman, but—a woman. Bewildered by life. Unable to adapt herself to things as they are. In the end, left aimless, with nothing to live for and a terror of living—showing how empty a place this world is for one who does not and cannot share its vices and vicious virtues.

She is the only daughter of a stupid, indifferent father and a petty, [pushy], house-wife mother. The household is rather poor—it has too much to be shabby and not enough to have any education or refinement.

She loves the boy with a wilder passion than she can realize. She is usually too calm, restrained and frail to think herself capable of such a primitive, raw feeling, almost beast-like in its overwhelming [intensity]. She is the only one who feels the Super-Being in the boy, feels it, without completely understanding it. She is frightened by him sometimes, but she is always ready to take his side against everybody. She might sometimes think he is wrong, but she always
feels
he is right. Her antagonism to common life, her infinite longing for something above it, centers on him, as the only relief from it she has ever met. She is not a strong, active, fighting enemy of that life. She does not even fully realize [the nature of] that life, because she is straight, honest, and “outside of it.” But she feels, blindly and instinctively, the horror of that life and she feels the boy is the only one who is so far and
so high
above it. Without her realizing it, her love for him is her love for life—her religion, hope, ambition, pride, and future—all these things having no particular meaning to her, the intensity of her feeling centered on one thing: him.

The whole of her tragedy is brought out in the last scene. He escapes from jail after being sentenced to death, and comes to her because she is the only person he can trust. But he is [forced to leave] her house; her mother is threatening to call the police and her father is expected to return home any moment and would be sure to denounce the criminal who is loathed by all mankind. In these moments, when she sees herself alone against the world, when she sees herself so little and helpless in facing the monster of humanity, when she sees the octopus that has caught in its sucking [tentacles] the one who is sacred beyond all sacredness to her—then she understands life for the first time. (And so must my readers.)

(The model for the girl: the “Prince-Flower,” qua modem; and myself, qua weak—the idealistic, longing side of me.)

She is medium height, very slim, rather frail. Not beautiful, but exquisite in her own way. Thin features. Brown hair. Gray eyes with long eyelashes. A fascinating smile that makes her look beautiful: a very feminine, delicate, and tempting smile.

The boy is not in love with her. He has never been in love. But he knows that she loves him. And he feels something like love, although it is more physical desire in the last scene when he kisses her wildly; he is feeling the call of life, when he is so near to losing it.

Just as the boy [embodies] the perfect egoism and will to live—the girl [embodies] the perfect love, the kind of overwhelming, intense, absolute passion that is so alien, so out-of-place on the “little street.” To her the so-called love problems have always been utterly impossible to understand. She doesn’t understand any tragedies of marriage, parents’ opposition, social obstacles and such. The love that she knows is something so immense, so dominant, so unquestionable, that she cannot see anything being considered beside it or opposed to it.

As a relief for the whole book, the few moments that she spends with him when he is hiding in her house, when they kiss each other for the first and last time, must be trembling with the intensity, joy, and ecstasy of life. This scene must show what is possible and what is being destroyed by the little street. The stronger the contrast, the better. The reader must feel an actual pain, and the wild desire to yell for something that can’t be explained in words—the life that no one knows.

 

[An early version of Ellsworth Toohey in
The Fountainhead.]

He has everything that “the little street” has and nothing that it should have. A small soul choked with a poisonous ambition to dominate and crush everybody and everything. Not the kind of passion for power that says: “I want to rule because I know that I am superior to others and I must dominate them”; but the kind that says: “I know that I am inferior and therefore I don’t want to let anything superior exist.” This is subconscious, of course, because one of those muddy souls would never admit it to itself. Consciously, it believes that “we are all equal” and defends that equality with all the jealous, greedy zeal of a bulldog that has his teeth sunk into a piece of meat; the dull, despotic zeal of mediocrity that is [concerned with] the equality of those above, which it wants to pull down, and not with those below, which it [allegedly] wants to pull up.

The pastor has no idea out of the ordinary, the common, the established and he does not want any such ideas to exist. He is not a clever hypocrite that despises the mob and only plays up to it to attain his own aim. He is the lowest, most poisonous, most dangerous type—the ambitious mediocrity. He wants to believe that the mob he serves really is the ruler and the lord of the world. He has no aim outside of that mob. He wants to believe that the mob’s ideas are the standards of the universe; that he is absolutely right in his petty, narrow little convictions; that everybody must not only obey these ideas, but actually
believe
them.

He knows how much of a blood brother he is to the mob. He also knows that there are those who stand far above it, and he wants to drag them down to the level of the mob, where
he
is the master [because he is] the best, “condensed” representative of that mob. He’s a devastating picture of a dull, diseased ambition that has filled [an otherwise] empty soul. The ambition of a skunk that knows the bad smell is his only strength and therefore makes it the highest principle of life on earth.