Atlas Shrugged, Death , 2013
From "Atlas Shrugged" series 2013, water color on paper, 56 x 42 cm.
From "Atlas Shrugged" series 2013, water color on paper, 56 x 42 cm.
Death , 2013
From "Atlas Shrugged" series 2013, water color on paper, 56 x 42 cm.
Water color on paper, 56 x 42 cm.
"Death
They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost – yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.
Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations – he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.
And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he’ll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent – and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent."
Excerpt from the book, "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957
They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost – yet such is their image of man’s nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is non-existent, that only the unknowable exists.
Do you observe what human faculty that doctrine was designed to ignore? It was man’s mind that had to be negated in order to make him fall apart. Once he surrendered reason, he was left at the mercy of two monsters whom he could not fathom or control: of a body moved by unaccountable instincts and of a soul moved by mystic revelations – he was left as the passively ravaged victim of a battle between a robot and a dictaphone.
And as he now crawls through the wreckage, groping blindly for a way to live, your teachers offer him the help of a morality that proclaims that he’ll find no solution and must seek no fulfillment on earth. Real existence, they tell him, is that which he cannot perceive, true consciousness is the faculty of perceiving the non-existent – and if he is unable to understand it, that is the proof that his existence is evil and his consciousness impotent."
Excerpt from the book, "Atlas Shrugged", by Ayn Rand, first published in 1957