Non-Contradiction: The Immovable Movers

Dagny Taggart visits the United Locomotive Works plant in New Jersey — having made Taggart Transcontinental wait for two Diesel engines for two years (p 63 s 133) — to see the company’s president (p 64 s 141). Heading through the plant, Dagny felt a “burst of too violent an anger” when she saw a machine that was not “worn out” but “rotted by neglect” and left to rust. Her meeting with the president is fruitless: no reasons are given for the delays; no production date is indicated; and Dagny’s attempts to get specific answers only net “condescending reproach” as though she “were giving proof of ill-breeding by breaking some unwritten code known to everyone else.” Dagny returns to New York City, and upon seeing the Taggart Building she thinks that it does not rest on pillars, but “on the engines that rolled across a continent.” The Taggart Building’s first need is “motive power, to keep that building standing; movement, to keep it immovable.”

When Dagny enters her office, Eddie Willers reveals that the Rio Norte Line contractor “left. retired. went out of business.” (p 64 s 141) Dagny is stunned, leaving one of her gloves “half-removed and forgotten” (p 65). No answers are available to her questions — “why?” “what happened?” “what did he say?” “where?” — and Eddie states, “He’s walked out of a pile of contracts that are worth a fortune. He had a waiting list of clients for the next three years. … I wouldn’t be frightened if I could understand it. . . . But a thing that can’t possibly have any reason. … He was the best contractor in the country.” Dagny wanted to say “Oh God, Eddie!” but keeps her voice even and declares another contractor will be found for the Rio Norte Line.

Dagny leaves her office filled with a “peculiar emptiness, which was not emptiness, but silence, not despair, but immobility, as though nothing within her were destroyed, but everything stood still” (p 65 s 141). Despite being the “motive power of her own happiness” she wanted for once to be “carried by the power of someone else’s achievement” (p 65) “as men on a dark prairie liked to see the lighted windows of a train going past” for reassurance “in the midst of empty miles and night” (p 66).

Dagny fails to find any comfort in the achievements she sees en route home (p 66 s 141). A radio plays a symphony with “no melody, no harmony, no rhythm” as though a “scream of chaos, of the irrational, of the helpless, of man’s self-abdication.” A bookstore displays stacks of The Vulture Is Molting, with placards hailing it as a “penetrating study of a businessman’s greed” and a “fearless revelation of man’s depravity.” A theater displays a severely bright billboard of an uninspiring woman and a tagline hailing it as a “momentous drama” of whether “should a woman tell?” A couple staggers out of a nightclub, the woman’s gown falling “like a slovenly housewife’s bathrobe” to expose her breast not in daring but as a “drudge’s indifference.” The man’s face did not show anticipation of a romantic adventure but the slyness of “a boy out to write obscenities on fences.”

Dagner grabs a newspaper before getting to her apartment on the “top floor of a skyscraper” (p 66 s 141) and playing a record of Richard Halley’s last symphony, his Fourth Concerto (p 67). The sounds of his music say to “we who hold the love and the secret of joy” that “there is no necessity for pain — why, then, is the worst pain reserved for those who will not accept its necessity?” Dagny listens with “her head thrown back, her eyes closed … half-stretched across the corner of a couch” (p 68).

A biography of Richard Halley ensues. His life begins in “garrets and basements” with a struggle “without the relief of violence” against a “deaf wall” of “indifference” while his compositions “overflowed with violent color” (p 67). One of his operas nets “booing and catcalls” but nineteen years later arouses the “greatest ovation the opera house had ever heard” (p 68). Reviews go from unforgiving to unforgivable: “It is noble that he he should have endured suffering, injustice, abuse at the hands of his brothers — in order to enrich their lives.” The day after his successful opening, Halley abruptly sold his works to his publisher, retired to an undisclosed location and offered no explanation except that “his career was over.”

Dagny goes to push her newspaper out of sight when she notices the face of Francisco d’Anconia on one of its pages (p 69). She struggles — “what of it?” “don’t read it” “don’t look at it” — with how his face is unchanged: “how could a face remain the same when everything else was gone?” Dagny struggles further to restrain herself from reading the newspaper, “not now — not to that music — oh, not to that music!” However, she buckles and reads a scandalous article regarding the married Mrs. Vail who tried to kill her husband to be with her lover Francisco d’Anconia; the only comment from Francisco d’Anconia is, “I never deny anything.” Furthermore, he arrives in New York City at the height of the scandal because, “I wanted to witness the farce.” The paper slips from Dagny’s hands and lets her head rest on her arm, crying while the chords of Halley’s music emanate “her quest, her cry.”