Atlas Shrugged

 CHAPTER VIII
BY OUR LOVE
The sun touched the tree tops on the slope of the hill, and they looked a bluish-silver, catching the color
of the sky. Dagny stood at the door of the cabin, with the first sunrays on her forehead and miles of forest
spread under her feet. The leaves went down from silver to green to the smoky blue of the shadows on
the road below. The light trickled down through the branches and shot upward in sudden spurts when it
hit a clump of ferns that became a fountain of green rays. It gave her pleasure to watch the motion of the
light over a stillness where nothing else could move.
She had marked the date, as she did each morning, on the sheet of paper she had tacked to the wall of
her room. The progression of the dates on that paper was the only movement in the stillness of her days,
like the record kept by a prisoner on a desert island. This morning's date was May 28.
She had intended the dates to lead to a purpose, but she could not say whether she had reached it or
not. She had come here with three assignments given, as orders, to herself: rest—learn to live without the
railroad—get the pain out of the way. Get it out of the way, were the words she used. She felt as if she
were tied to some wounded stranger who could be stricken at any moment by an attack that would
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drown her in his screams. She felt no pity for the stranger, only a contemptuous impatience; she had to
fight him and destroy him, then her way would be clear to decide what she wished to do; but the stranger
was not easy to fight.
The assignment to rest had been easier. She found that she liked the solitude; she awakened in the
morning with a feeling of confident benevolence, the sense that she could venture forth and be willing to
deal with whatever she found. In the city, she had lived in chronic tension to withstand the shock of
anger, indignation, disgust, contempt.
The only danger to threaten her here was the simple pain of some physical accident; it seemed innocent
and easy by comparison, The cabin was far from any traveled road; it had remained as her father had left
it. She cooked her meals on a wood-burning stove and gathered the wood on the hillsides. She cleared
the brush from under her walls, she reshingled the roof, she repainted the door and the frames of the
windows. Rains, weeds and brush had swallowed the steps of what had once been a terraced path rising
up the hill from the road to the cabin. She rebuilt it, clearing the terraces, re-laying the stones, bracing the
banks of soft earth with walls of boulders. It gave her pleasure to devise complex systems of levers and
pulleys out of old scraps of iron and rope, then to move weights of rock that were much beyond her
physical power. She planted a few seeds of nasturtiums and morning glories, to see one spreading slowly
over the ground and the other climbing up the tree trunks, to see them grow, to see progression and
movement.
The work gave her the calm she needed; she had not noticed how she began it or why; she had started
without conscious intention, but she saw it growing under her hands, pulling her forward, giving her a
healing sense of peace. Then she understood that what she needed was the motion to a purpose, no
matter how small or in what form, the sense of an activity going step by step to some chosen end across
a span of time. The work of cooking a meal was like a closed circle, completed and gone, leading
nowhere. But the work of building a path was a living sum, so that no day was left to die behind her, but
each day contained all those that preceded it, each day acquired its immortality on every succeeding
tomorrow. A circle, she thought, is the movement proper to physical nature, they say that there's nothing
but circular motion in the inanimate universe around us, but the straight line is the badge of man, the
straight line of a geometrical abstraction that makes roads, rails and bridges, the straight line that cuts the
curving aimlessness of nature by a purposeful motion from a start to an end.
The cooking of meals, she thought, is like the feeding of coal to an engine for the sake of a great run, but
what would be the imbecile torture of coaling an engine that had no run to make? It is not proper for
man's life to be a circle, she thought, or a string of circles dropping off like zeros behind him—man's life
must be a straight line of motion from goal to farther goal, each leading to the next and to a single growing
sum, like a journey down the track of a railroad, from station to station to—oh, stop it!
Stop it—she told herself in quiet severity, when the scream of the wounded stranger was choked
off—don't think of that, don't look too far, you like building this path, build it, don't look beyond the foot
of the hill.
She had driven a few times to the store in Woodstock, twenty miles away, to buy supplies and food.
Woodstock was a small huddle of dying structures, built generations ago for some reason and hope long
since forgotten. There was no railroad to feed it, no electric power, nothing but a county highway
growing emptier year by year.
The only store was a wooden hovel, with spider-eaten corners and a rotted patch in the middle of the
floor, eaten by the rains that came through the leaking roof. The storekeeper was a fat, pallid woman
who moved with effort, but seemed indifferent to her own discomfort. The stock of food consisted of