Free The Journals of Ayn Rand by Ayn Rand

austere expression of a saint. He has little, damp, lusty eyes and the thin, dry lips of a cold hypocrite. He has white hands with short, fat fingers and shapeless fingernails that are more wide than long. Likes to wear rings. Has thin, straight hair which is beginning to gray, with a bald spot showing rosy and soft like the flesh of a baby. He has a deep, slow, dignified voice and a hee-hee-ing, indecent, insincere laugh.
    He is a very prominent figure. Especially popular among the semi-literate lower classes, the ones that are always ready to fall for religious preaching. To some, he is a beloved and respected “father”; others are rather indifferent themselves, but will not tolerate any disrespect or disbelief of him and are always ready to defend him furiously against anyone doubting his authority. The business magnates and such despise him and feel an instinctive disgust toward him, but they have to tolerate and stay on good terms with him for fear of his dark, “backstage” power.
    He hates all successful people. A successful man, in any line, is his personal enemy. He rejoices at every failure and at the fall of every idol.
    (The model for the pastor: the pastor of the Ku Klux Klan that I read about. The movie censors. All “reformers.” An endless list of “little street‘ers” that I will note down as they come.)
     
    [Other Characters]
    A fat woman that has made her immense fortune by having bad houses [houses of prostitution]. An influential, respectable citizen. Very proudly conscious of her power. Ambitious to get or buy everything she wants. Convinced that there is nothing so high that she cannot get it. She marries a brilliant, aristocratic, divinely handsome young man, Eric “Goldenlocks.” Marries him because she “can afford to have a pretty boy in her bed” if she wants one.
    Eric is poor, ambitious, conceited and not very strong. He just sells himself, marrying her for her money, knowing all about her and the source of her fortune. He is tall, with blue eyes, golden hair and all the Siegfried like, fresh, sparkling beauty of a snow-covered Scandinavian mountain peak on a sunny morning. He marries the woman. We see him later, with a heavy, flabby, ghastly white face, red eyelids, shiny nose, sagging double-chin, unkempt hair, muddled, expressionless eyes and the reputation of a chronic drunkard.
    He had been in love, before his marriage, with a charming, brilliant girl from an old family, now poor and barely keeping up a decent appearance to support the dignity of their name. His marriage to the woman is a terrible blow to the girl. A middle-aged nouveau riche, a heavy, common brute, had been courting her in his ambition to possess something he felt to be so above him, a woman of the real aristocracy. She marries him now—in despair. We see her later, overdressed in an expensive and tasteless way, having for a lover a cheap, notorious “heartbreaker.” A little detail: before all this, a young college girl—romantic, sensitive, but not very attractive—has committed suicide over her hopeless love for the handsome Eric “Goldenlocks.”
    A genius gone wrong. A handsome, brilliant young actor with a fine mind and a beautiful soul. Famous and successful, but gone wrong in that he is genuinely unhappy; his life is empty of desires or interests; he is cynical, tired, disgusted with everything—inside. Outside—he leads a wild life full of vice. He is not clear to himself, there is a continual chaos in his mind, regarding himself and the world. He does not know what he lives for or why he lives. He does not care —in an immense sense. An example of a fine frame that the little street has filled with its rotten content. Instinctively, he does not accept [the little street’s view of life], he revolts against it—but he has no other. And it is too late for another. He shows how empty the little street’s ideals are and what a wreck they make of an exceptional being. For they can’t fill