The Journals of Ayn Rand (12 page)

When Danny kills the pastor, he shoots him straight in the face, mad with loathing and the desire to destroy him. He then shoots the rest of the bullets into the body, in his hatred and fury to kill. After that—no regrets, no remorse whatsoever. A clever and calm scheme to escape. He is found and arrested only through the betrayal of a friend.

Danny becomes a criminal while he is scheming his vengeance. In one scene, another criminal dies in his arms while hiding from the police. The young man is unable to get help, preferring to die than to be discovered; he dies from bullet wounds, choking with blood. His beautiful last moments and words. The impression it makes on Danny.

Danny’s “fan mail” in jail. The disgusting letters of hatred and the even more disgusting letters of sympathy. Among the latter: declarations of love from half-witted, hysterical old maids; religious preaching and propaganda; the consolations and sympathy of “good Christians” for a “poor, erring sinner,” and so on. Danny orders the jailers to stop bringing him the mail and to instead “use it in the toilet.”

[
The Little Street ends here. The booklet closes with the following personal notes.
]

From now on—no thought whatever about yourself, only about your work. You don’t exist. You are only a writing engine. Don’t stop, until you really and
honestly
know that you
cannot
go on.

Learn to enjoy action, and effort.

Learn that your work is a certain kind of work and that the state of your mind should be different from that which you have when doing nothing. You can’t write and do something else.

You must know how to control your moods and your mind. Be absolute master of yourself and your mind. How can you rule anybody or anything, if you can’t rule your own mind?

The secret of life: You must be
nothing but will.
Know what you want and do it. Know what you are doing and why you are doing it, every minute of the day. All will and all control.
Send everything else to hell!

Be a tyrant—no compromises with yourself. Do everything
absolutely.

Try to forget yourself—to forget all high ideas, ambitions, supermen and so on. Try to put yourself into the psychology of ordinary people, when you think of stories. Try to be
calm,
balanced, indifferent, normal, and not enthusiastic, passionate, excited, ecstatic, flaming, tense.

Learn to be calm, for goodness sake!

Look at everything through the eyes of a very skeptical, very prosaic businessman.

Think more of the psychology of your heroes, according to their characters.

Not so straight and crude. The same things can be more complicated and different, as they usually are in life.

2

Dominant trait: an intense, passionate hunger for life. Beautifully sensitive to the real meaning and value of life—and crushed under the senseless, morbid, suffocating conditions of a miserable existence. Proud and definite. Unbreakable. One of the very few—and the only one in the book—who, as a person, is not in the least affected by the new conditions; who denies them and does not quite understand their right or reason for existence. She fights them—externally; and the fight is the more tragic because, internally, she is left absolutely untouched and unaffected. A sane, healthy individual thrown into the very depths of abnormal, inhuman conditions.

Independent. Self-assured. Educated in a wealthy family by a mother who let her grow up as she pleased, without any restraints or influences, and with plenty of everything she needed. As a result, she has a calm poise and the full, free strength of her own unusual personality that has not accumulated any useless, alien inhibitions from any outside source. No religion whatsoever. Brilliant mind. Lots of courage and daring. Only her calm exterior poise hides her tempestuous emotional nature. A sort of graceful restraint under which one can feel the storming fire.

Rather cold and indifferent to everything that does not interest her deeply. Absolutely proof against all influences. Always alone and, to most people, aloof. Disliked by women. No girlfriends. No “beaux.” Indifferent to men. Dimly conscious of her tremendous sexual power—if she wanted to use it. Men are attracted to her and afraid. Nothing flirting or “come hither” in her. The more powerful, then, is her attraction for men with whom she condescended to be a woman, and who saw the woman in her: Andrei and Leo.

Honest and straightforward—the honesty of pride and of superiority. Misunderstood. Hurt by it, sometimes, yet used to her loneliness, intelligent enough to realize that it is unavoidable. A strong determination and disdainful pride—and sometimes, beneath it, an indefinable, charming, feminine weakness and helplessness—something of the frightened child, which she is to a great extent. Always feminine in the best sense of that word, that is, graceful, aloof, charming. Never the masculine, “intellectual,” “rough and ready” type of woman [common] in politics, or the alleged “woman of brains.” Capable of being cruel. Sometimes conceited—at the feeling of her power.

Her love for Leo—the concentrated strength of all her will to live. He is, to her, the symbol of everything she wants and the meaning of life as she sees it. Therefore, her indifference to others, the clarity of her mind that leaves her cool to many useless emotions and affections, her straightforwardness—these lead her to an all-absorbing passion, almost unbearable for a human being.

Dominant trait: a born individualist and leader who never discovered it. A great mind and a profound honesty. An iron will and unconquerable strength. A great calm and deliberation—the calm of a man who knows he is master of himself and has learned long ago to have complete self-control. Occasional, very rare flashes of temper that show the real fire in him—a fire, however, that never gets the best of the man.

His father: a factory worker, mixed in politics and sent to Siberia during the Revolution of 1905; died in exile. His mother: died shortly afterwards of poverty and overwork. He, the only son, made his way through the hardest work [with an] iron determination, and a long toil that did not break him, but only taught him patience and hardened him. No school education; self-educated and self-made. Always lonely and aloof, aloof without realizing it. Never a good mixer. Never a popular fellow. In his political career, he advanced through his brilliant ability and unquestionable honesty more than through popularity in the Party, where he is far from being popular. His comrades in the Party are always his political friends, never his personal chums; this is not the result of any deliberate attitude taken by him, but the natural behavior of a man who has devoted his entire life to his political ideals and sees only that.

As to those ideals: they are the result of his early hatred of the existing system of society—not so much hatred, but rather a calm and cool determination of long ago: to do away, someday, somehow, with the inhuman conditions that he went through and in which he started his life. The people whose champion he is stand before his eyes as individuals, as men like himself, whose
life
is crushed by the senseless power of a society that has no right to a man’s life. In that, and more unconsciously than hers, his tragedy is the same as Kira’s. Both are superior individuals. Both have in their souls the sensitivity, the understanding, the hunger for the real life, as few men see it. Both rise to fight for their rights to that life; and both face the same enemy: society, the state, the mass. She is stronger, in that she realizes the fight and the enemy. He is more tragic, because his fight is unconscious: the fight against society of a man who stands as a champion of the most sociable ideals.

He is a man that would have been a Napoleon—had he been born with less conscience and idealism. He has an iron devotion to his ideals, the devotion of a medieval martyr. Capable of anything, any cruelty, if convinced that his aim needs it. Cruelty for the cause is, to him, a victory over himself; it gives him the feeling of doing his duty against his sentiment.

Yet a profound egoism lies under that devotion to his work, for it is
his
work and
his
aim that he is serving. His ideals have not been inspired by sympathy and compassion for the suffering of the masses. It is his suffering and
his pride
that made him take arms against society. This is subconscious, for it’s not his personal interests that he has in mind, it’s the victory of his idea—and his idea is the uprising of fighters, individuals, strong men of the people crushed under a senseless, ignoble system.

The taste, manners, and tact of an aristocrat—but not conventional manners, just the poise and dignity of a man with inborn good judgment. Instinctive, unconscious understanding of beauty and art; an untrained, but wise esthetic feeling, [which is] dormant, never given much attention or opportu nity. Delicate and sensitive to other people’s feelings—no violent hatred or prejudices against anyone. No religion.

No conceit. One of the few people who is absolutely untouched by flattery, admiration, or any form of other people’s opinion. Not because of a proud disdain, but because of a natural indifference to it. Subconsciously, he knows his superiority and does not need any one’s endorsement. Consciously, he is interested only in doing what he thinks is right; [he wants to be] satisfied in his own eyes. A self-discipline learned long ago.