of a sensation too complete to endure. While the strength of her body was gone, while her mind had lost the faculty of consciousness, a single emotion drew on her remnants of energy, of understanding, of judgment, of control, leaving her nothing to resist it with or to direct it, making her unable to desire, only to feel, reducing her to a mere sensation—a static sensation without start or goal. She kept seeing his figure in her mind—his figure as he had stood at the door of the structure—she felt nothing else, no wish, no hope, no estimate of her feeling, no name for it, no relation to herself—there was no entity such as herself, she was not a person, only a function, the function of seeing him, and the sight was its own meaning and purpose, with no further end to reach.
My method here is to lead the reader to a certain abstraction—that this is a strong, violent love—by giving him a special kind of concretes. I select those touches of Dagny’s experience that are essential to the nature of her feeling. How does the reader know that her feeling is not, say, a light infatuation? The concretes given do not pertain to infatuation.
To project the full reality of the scene, I present not merely what Dagny feels, but also that which she is responding to. Her emotion is not an introspective one; she feels it because she is looking at Galt in a certain place in a certain context. So I present, by means of essentials, a setting that creates a mood consonant with her emotion.
Possibly, a bird flew across the trees in this moment, or a butterfly fluttered somewhere. Dagny might even have been aware of these, on the edge of her consciousness. But to include them would have been disastrous. That would have been to follow the Naturalistic method of including accidental details; whereas I focus only on the essentials of Dagny’s feeling and of the setting.
I always reproduce human awareness as it is experienced in reality, assuming a certain kind of character. (For instance, Dagny is not a woman who would be unaware of the exact nature of what she experiences. I showed that kind of psychology in the passages dealing with James Taggart.) In this moment, when Dagny is fully aware for the first time of her feeling for Galt, she would not think, “I’m madly in love,” or “Love is an important value.” One does not think like that. I project and reproduce that which would be the focus of Dagny’s awareness.
The beginning of the first passage suggests Dagny’s sudden physical awareness of Galt. “She was suddenly aware that they were alone; it was an awareness that stressed the fact, permitting no further implication, yet holding the full meaning of the unnamed in that special stress. They were alone in a silent forest, at the foot of a structure that looked like an ancient temple—and she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind.” I suggest sex; it is a deliberate hint, without using the word. This passage follows a description of Galt’s temple, which contains his invention; and I have planted earlier that Dagny regards sex as the expression of achievement and of one’s highest values. The statement “she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind” reminds the reader that the sight of a great achievement would lead Dagny to think of sex; my use of words like temple, rite, and altar, which connote religion or high values, reminds him that she considers sex a sacred value. The reader connects it all lightning-like in his mind: “Yes, she would feel that way, because of her attitude toward love and achievement.”
The statement “she knew what rite was the proper form of worship to be offered on an altar of that kind” is literarily much stronger than, say, “she felt that she wanted to sleep with him.” It is stronger because I make the reader draw the conclusion.
The next sentence brings the passage from the abstract down to the immediate moment, giving the sensory reality of Dagny’s experience. Observe the slant: “She felt a sudden pressure at the base of her throat”—obviously a sexual emotion—“her head leaned back a little, no more than to feel the faint shift of a current against her hair”—a purely sensuous description—“but it was as if she were