Radiantly Absent: Causeless, Purposeless ===== To take the pounding violence of sixteen motors, she thought, the thrust of seven thousand tons of steel and freight, to withstand it, grip it and swing it around a curve, was the impossible feat performed by two strips of metal no wider than her arm ... She felt the sweep of emotion which she could not contain, as of something bursting upward... She moved slowly along the length of the motor units, down a narrow passage between the engines and the wall. She felt the immodesty of the intruder, as is she had slipped inside a living creature, under its silver skin and were watching its life beating in gray metal cylinder, in twisted coils, in sealed tubes, in the convulsive whirl of blades in wire cages... Why had she always felt that joyous sense of confidence when looking at machines? - she thought. In these giant shapes, two aspects pertaining to the inhuman were radiantly absent: the causeless and the purposeless... They a-r-e alive, she thought, because they are the physical shape of the action of a living power - of the mind that had been able to grasp the whole of this complexity, to set its purpose, to give it form... They a-r-e alive, she thought, but their soul operates them by remote control. Their soul is in every man who has the capacity to equal this achievement. Should the soul vanish from the earth, the motors would stop, because that is the power which keeps them going - not the oil under the floor under her feet, the oil that would then become primeval ooze again - not the steel cylinders that would become stains of rust on the walls of the caves of shivering savages - the power of a living mind-the power of thought and choice and purpose. Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged, pp 230-231 My Commentary: Hoooo-ahhh!!
Posted on: Mon, 16 Sep 2013 02:02:49 +0000