The Journals of Ayn Rand (15 page)

[
For Kira’s death scene.
]

Earth—snow, going up and down, snow lighting the sky, a haze ahead—and she isn’t sure whether it’s close at her face or miles away. Frightened when she sees a tree—crouches like an animal. Bands of snow rising in the wind as if reaching the low sky in the distance.

Sky—black and gray and patches of blue that could not exist in daytime. Strips of stars that make her uncomfortable. Patches of light from nowhere.

Silence—shadows of sounds. Afraid to stop to listen beyond the sounds of her feet. Long journey—as if there had never been anything else in the world beyond that snow.

Weariness.
Pain in her knees as if climbing a stairway. Her cheeks frozen. Pain in her finger-joints, in her back, in her shoulder blades. Legs moving as if not her own. Suddenly she feels well, too well. Sudden break of pain. Cannot stop at any price. Bending—to be less to carry.

Thoughts; She has to get out.
Has she any questions to be answered? To be answered there. It won’t get her. She can’t give up. Looking at stars—head thrown back, arms outstretched—isn’t there a place for her in the world? Checking on money in jacket often. Thinks dimly of “Cafe Diggy-Daggy” —repeating it senselessly, nickel plated letters insolent in their simplicity in dull white glass. Doesn’t know what awaits her. Knows only that she has to get out. An instinct chasing her, like that of an animal. Nothing behind her—only that ahead. “You’re a good soldier.”

Growing insane determination: to go on, to get out.

Worries over bills. “Good soldier.”

Finds herself in the snow suddenly. “I must have fainted again.”

Rolls down side of the hill. Gets up slowly—seems like hours.

Crawls up the side of the hill, on her hands and knees. Rises again.

Pink froth at her lips. Throws away the scarf. Throws away the jacket.

Staggering in the snow, her hair in the wind, bloodstains spreading on her gown.

Calling Leo—the Leo that would have been there, where she is going.

What life had been. The Viking. Murmuring the “Song of Broken Glass.”

That which had been promised cannot be denied to her.

Dawn—Beauty in nature, which is more than the beauty of nature, but the beauty of an idea.

A last ecstasy of life. “Life that is a reason unto itself.” That which was possible.

 

[
An excerpt from an autobiographical note that AR sent to her publisher.
]

I have been asked why I wrote this novel. I think the answer is obvious. I have seen Soviet life as few writers outside Russia have seen it. And while the world at large is deluged to the saturation point with minute accounts of Soviet Russia, including all the latest statistics up to every single tractor produced by the “great experiment,” very little has been said about actual life under communism, about living beings, not slogans and theories. Theories against practice—that’s something too often overlooked in every important question today. With due apologies to good manners, I don’t give a damn about theories. I do give a good deal about human beings. No, not all of them. Only those worthy of the name.

Also, if one takes even the swiftest look at the world today, one cannot help but see the greatest, most urgent conflict of our times: the individual against the collective. That problem interests me above all others in my writing. No country on earth offers such a startling and revealing view of that conflict as Soviet Russia. Hence—
We the Living.
The plot of my novel is entirely fictitious. The background and circumstances which make the plot possible—are entirely true.

3

These are the vague beginnings of an amateur philosopher. To be checked with what I learn when I master philosophy—then see how much of it has already been said, and whether I have anything new to say, or anything old to say better than it has already been said.

 

The human race has only two unlimited capacities: for suffering and for lying.

I want to fight religion as the root of all human lying and the only excuse for suffering.

I believe—and I want to gather all the facts to illustrate this—that the worst curse on mankind is the ability to consider ideals as something quite abstract and detached from one’s everyday life. The ability to
live
and
think
quite differently, thus eliminating thinking from your actual life. This applied not to deliberate and conscious hypocrites, but to those more dangerous and hopeless ones who, alone with themselves and to themselves, tolerate a complete break between their convictions and their lives, and still believe that they have convictions. To them, either their ideals or their lives are worthless—and usually both.

I hold religion mainly responsible for this. I want to prove that religion breaks a character before it’s formed, in childhood, by teaching a child lies before he knows what a lie is, by breaking him of the habit of thinking before he has begun to think, by making him a hypocrite before he knows any other possible attitude toward life. If a child is taught ideals that he knows are contrary to his own deepest instincts, [ideals] such as unselfishness, meekness, and self-sacrifice, if he is told he is a miserable sinner for not living up to ideals he can never reach and
doesn’t want
to reach, then his natural reaction is to consider all ideals as out of his reach forever, as something theoretical and quite apart from his own actual life. Thus the beginning of self-hypocrisy, the killing of all desire for a living ideal.

Religion is also the first enemy of the ability to think. That ability is not used by men to one tenth of its possibility, yet before they learn to think they are discouraged by being ordered to take things on faith.
Faith is the worst curse of mankind;
it is the exact antithesis and enemy of
thought.
I want to learn
why
men do not use logical reasoning to govern their lives and [solve] their problems. Is it impossible to them or has it been taught to them as impossible?

I believe this last. And the teacher is the church.
Thought
and
reason
are the only weapons of mankind, the only possible bond of understanding among men. Anyone who demands that anything be taken on
faith
—or relies on any super-mental, super-logical instinct—denies all reason.

Why are men so afraid of pure, logical reasoning? Why do they have a profound, ferocious hatred of it?

Are instincts and emotions necessarily beyond the control of plain thinking? Or were they trained to be? Why is a complete harmony between mind and emotions impossible? Isn’t it merely a matter of strict mental honesty? And who stands at the very bottom of denying such honesty? Isn’t it the church?

I want to be known as the greatest champion of reason and the greatest enemy of religion.

 

In regard to free will: Why is it used as an argument against freedom of the will that it is motivated by a circumstance of the outside world? Is there any such thing as will without the content to which it is applied? Isn’t will a pure abstraction, not an object? Isn’t it a
verb
rather than a noun, and as such meaningless without that upon which it acts? The will does not have to be
without reason,
or motivation, in order to be free. One’s act may be motivated by an outside reason, but the choice of that reason is our
free will.
An example of the determinists: if a man drinks a glass of water, he does it because he is thirsty, therefore his will isn’t free, it’s motivated by his physical condition. But he drinks the glass of water
because
he needs it
and decides
that he wants to drink it. If his sweetheart’s life had depended on his
not
drinking that water, he probably would not have touched it, no matter what his thirst. Or if it were a question of his life or hers, he would have to select and make the decision. In other words, he drinks because he’s thirsty, but it is not the thirst that determines his action, the thirst only motivates it.
A motivation
is not
a reason.
(Has that anything to do with the question of free will?)

Doesn’t the “free will” question come under the general question of human reason—and
its
freedom? If an action is logical—does that mean it is not free? Or is logic considered a restriction? If so—upon
what?
Is there anything conceivable beyond logic? Does a
free
action necessarily mean an
unreasonable
one? And if
mind
(or reason) depends on the outside world for its contents—is it
reason
any the less?

Has anyone properly described logic and human reason?

All philosophy is a set of thoughts. Thoughts are [governed] by certain implacable rules. If we deny these rules—which are an integral part of thoughts—we deny the thoughts. If we deny the thoughts—we deny the philosophy. So why bother at all? (In answer to all those who build transcendental, super-reasonable, super-logical philosophic systems.)

Is there—or should there be—such a thing as emotion opposed to reason? Isn’t it merely a form of undeveloped reason, a form of stupidity?

How and why can will be considered apart from the mind? If thinking is free from subconscious influences—why not the will?

And if, as according to [H. L.] Mencken, the question of “freedom of the will” has to be studied on the basis of psychology with all its dark complexes—then what are we actually studying? Will as it is expressed in subnormal cases? Or in normal, average cases? Or in the highest instances of the human [mind]?

Are we studying will as it is actually in the majority of cases—or as
it can be essentially,
as a human attribute?

Do we judge all human terms as applied to existing humanity or to humanity’s highest possibility?

If we are trying to form a general conception of a “stomach,” do we study a hundred diseased stomachs and form our general conception from them, so that “stomach” as such is something with a number of diseases attached to it—or do we find the healthy stomach first, in order to learn what it is, and
then
judge the others by comparison?

Is ethics necessarily and basically a social conception? Have there been systems of ethics written primarily on the basis of an
individual?
Can that be done?

Are ethics at all a matter of history? Does it matter how and where they developed? Is a history of ethics necessary? I believe only a
system of ethics
is necessary, and it has to stand or fall on its own merits—
not
on any history or far away beginning. For instance, when discussing the social instinct—does it matter whether it had existed in the early savages? We do not judge the value of an automobile by the first chariot ever used in the history of men. Supposing men were born social (and even that is a question)—does it mean that they have to remain so?

“Social life,” said Kropotkin, “that is, we, not
I
, is the normal form of life (in man).
It is life itself.”
Good God Almighty!!!! [
Petr Alekseevich Kropotkin
(1842-1941)
was a Russian socialist who advocated the revolt of
the
“working class.
”]

This is
exactly
what I’m going to fight. For
the exact opposite is true.

If man started as a social animal—isn’t all progress and civilization directed toward making him
an individual
? Isn’t that the only possible progress? If men are the highest of animals, isn’t
man
the next step?

 

In regard to
The Revolt of the Masses
[
by José Ortega y Gasset
]: Isn’t it a terrible generalization—that can be interpreted in too many different ways—to say that a “noble” man strives to serve and obey, and the “mass” man to do as he pleases?

If what is meant is the noble man’s servitude to his own standards and ideas—is that to be called servitude? If the standards are his, isn’t he precisely obeying himself and doing what he pleases? No truly noble man is going to obey standards set for him by someone else.
That
is the action of the
mass
man. It is the mass man who
cannot
do as he wishes, because he has no wishes; he has to have his standards—or the nearest to that word that he can come—dictated to him.

This leads me again to a question that is part of the general “free will” question. What exactly is freedom? Surely, freedom does not mean an empty blank. If a man obeys his own ideals—how can that be called servitude? If a man has no ideals at all—why is that called freedom? How can any human quality, such as freedom, be disconnected from its content? Isn’t there a terrible mistake of abstraction here? Isn’t it as Nietzsche said: “Not freedom
from
what, but freedom
for
what?”