The glare [of the first heat for the first order of Rearden Metal] cut a moment’s wedge across his eyes, which had the color and quality of pale blue ice–then across the black web of the metal column and the ash-blond strands of his hair–then across the belt of his trenchcoat and the pockets where he held his hands. His body was tall and gaunt; he had always been too tall for those around him. His face was cut by prominent cheekbones and by a few sharp lines; they were not the lines of age, he had always had them: this had made him look old at twenty, and young now, at forty-five, because it was unyielding, and cruel, because it was expressionless. (p 28)
Henry was 14 years old when he had his first day of work in a Minnesota iron mine. Resolved to own his own mine, by 30 years of age he had bought a failing iron mine and established Rearden Ore (p 30). At one point he collapsed on his desk under years of exhaustion and asked himself “who had started him and kept him going” — but then he returned to work and never asked that question again (p 31). When he was 35 years old he bought a closed, rusted and weedy steel plant in Pennsylvania. A newspaper remarked, “Henry Rearden’s venture into steel is hopeless.” Then today, he thought to himself that the “strain and agony” were worth it because today the “first heat of the first order of Rearden Metal had been poured to become rails for Taggart Transcontinental.”
When he did not smile, his face looked inanimate, only his eyes remained alive, active with a cold, brilliant clarity of perception. But what he was made to feel by the things he perceived, no one would be permitted to know, she [Dagny] thought, perhaps not even himself. (p 84 s 148)
“When I heard about the Anti-dog-eat-dog business, it made me sick. But don’t worry about the goddamn bastards.” The two words sounded shockingly violent, because his face and voice remained calm. “You and I will always be there to save the country from the consequences of their actions. … All that lunacy is temporary. It can’t last. It’s demented, so it has to defeat itself. You and I will just have to work a little harder for a while, that’s all.” (p 84 s 148)
He had always known that business was regarded as some sort of secret, shameful cult, which one did not impose on innocent laymen, that people thought of it as an ugly necessity, to be performed but never mentioned, that to talk shop was an offense against higher sensibilities, that just as one washed machine grease off one’s hands before coming home, so one was supposed to wash the stain of business off one’s mind before entering a drawing room. He had never held that creed, but he had accepted it as natural that his family should hold it. He took it for granted — wordlessly, in the manner of a feeling absorbed in childhood, left unquestioned and unnamed — that he had dedicated himself, like the martyr of some dark religion, to the service of a faith which was his passionate love, but which made him an outcast among men, whose sympathy he was not to expect. (p 127-128 s 161)
He remembered the silent reproach, the look of accusation, long-bearing patience and scorn, which he always saw in the eyes of his family when they caught some evidence of his passion for his business — and the futility of his silence, of his hope that they would not think Rearden Steel meant as much to him as it did — like a drunkard pretending indifference to liquor, among people who watch him with the scornful amusement of their full knowledge of his shameful weakness. (p 128 s 161)
Rand, Ayn. 1957. Atlas Shrugged. New York City: Penguin Group.
First published
July 2, 2009
Last modified
October 4, 2011