Atlas Shrugged
Written by Ayn Rand
Hank, I want nothing from you except what you wish to give me. Do you remember that you called me a trader once? I want you to come to me seeking nothing but your own enjoyment. So long as you wish to remain married, whatever your reason, I have no right to resent it. My way of trading is to know that the joy you give me is paid for by the joy you get from me, not by your suffering or mine. I don’t accept sacrifice and I don’t make them. If you asked me for more than you meant to me, I would refuse. If you asked me to give up the railroad, I’d leave you. If ever the pleasure of one has to be brought by the paid of the other, there better be no trade at all. A trade by which one gains and the other loses is a fraud. You don’t do it in business, Hank. Don’t do it in your own life.
Destruction is the price of any contradiction.
Part of the intensity of her relief – she thought, as she walked by his side – was the shock of contrast: she had seen with the sudden, immediate vividness of sensory perception, an exact picture of the what the code of self-sacrifice would have meant, if enacted by the three of them. Galt, giving up the women he wanted, for the sake of his friend, faking his greatest feeling our of existence and himself out of her life, no matter what the cost to him and to her, then dragging the rest of his years through the waste of the unreached and unfulfilled – she, turning for consolation to a second choice, faking a love she did not feel, being willing to fake, since her will to self-deceit was the essential required for Galts self-sacrifice, then living out her years in hopeless longing, accepting as relief for an unhealing wound, some moments of weary affection, plus the tenet that love is futile and happiness is not to be found on earth. Francisco, struggling in the elusive fog of a counterfeit reality, his life a fraud staged by the two people who were dearest to him, and most trusted, struggling to grasp what was missing from his happiness, struggling down the brittle scaffold of a lie over the abyss of the discovery that he was not the man she loved, but only a resented substitute, 1/2 charity patient, 1/2 crutch, his perceptiveness becoming his danger and only his surrender to the lethargic stupidity protecting the shoddy structure of his joy, struggling and giving up and settling into the dreary routine of the conviction that fulfillment is impossible to man – the three of them, who had all the gifts of existence spread out before the, ending up as embittered hulks, who cry in despair that life is frustration – the frustation of not being able to make unreality real.