Novel Awakening

Who is John Galt? begins the book,
that classic by Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged...
a tour-de-force adventurous
breathtaking in its scope,
the story of a man who stopped
the motor of the world...
and he (the reader) who blithely embraced
mysticism (the supernatural)
being so indoctrinated by priestly chants
by ministers, by parents passing on religious beliefs
to children like so many threadbare rags,
immersed himself among those pages
that spoke of railroads, of Hank Reardon’s mills,
of Dagny Taggart’s formidable will and love affair,
of the copper mines of Francisco D’Anconia...
to celebrate the mind of man
(to which the book holds dear as life)
denouncing moochers, denouncing anti-life,
highlighting Aristotle’s, A is A
because reality can be no less...
then culminating at the end
(and to that end it is no small measure),
with John Galt’s speech (a mini-novel in itself)
where common sense and philosophy conjoin,
where Galt declares that he will never
live for the sake of another man,
declaring that they (the mystics of the world)
have cut man in two
and this was due (essentially)
to an evil and immoral code,
that monstrous absurdity
known as Original sin...
the reader never really thinking about the myth
(thinking being discouraged in lieu of faith),
yet realizing then that robots in a garden
cannot be held accountable
for a wrong they did not know was wrong.
The scales removed from naive eyes,
novel monumental, Galt’s amazing words
the freedom gained to think, to live.


40 Lines
Writer’s Cramp
9-1-14