Atlas’s description of Halley’s Fourth Concerto:
It rose in tortured triumph, speaking its denial of pain, its hymn to a distant vision. … The Concerto was a great cry of rebellion. It was a ‘no’ flung at some vast process of torture, a denial of suffering, a denial that held the agony of the struggle to break free. … The sounds of torture became defiance, the statement of agony became a hymn to a distant vision for whose sake anything was worth enduring, even this. It was the song of rebellion – and of a desperate quest.
Atlas’s description of Halley’s Fifth Concerto:
It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort. Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an immense deliverance.
What the movie is giving us as the “John Galt Theme”:
Parturiunt montes nascetur ridiculus mus.
Actually the mountain in Hawaii that erupted a few months after Rand’s death, and hasn’t stopped since (!), has entered a new phase.
I’m sure plenty of conservatives will be disoriented that John Galt is the inspiration for high-speed rail and Mr. Thompson is in charge of those trying to stop the rail from spreading.
Roderick, I’m interested in your reaction to Bleeding Heart Libertarians…
In case you’re wondering, they subscribe to Rawls’s Difference Principle,