The Sacred and The Profane.
Cherryl Brooks and Jim Taggart
Cherryl Brooks is introduced in this chapter. She is a young woman working at a dime store. Jim befriends her for his own perverted pleasure.
There are numerous things in their conversations that contrast these two characters. Jim has had the benefit of a rich family and a great education, while Cherryl is from a poor family and little education.
On his way into the dime store, he thinks that soon it will go out of business. This thought gave him pleasure.
Cherryl believes and says to Jim that “nobody’s really good enough for you.” This leads her to all types of trouble. She believes that Jim is a great and powerful man and deserves the best of the best.
She later tells him about her family and the poor: “We were stinking poor and not giving a damn about it. That’s what I couldn’t take — that they didn’t give a damn. Not enough to life a finger…” She believes in hard work and personal responsibility.
Jim defines a human: “A weak, ugly, sinful creature, born that way, rotten in his bones — so humility is the one virtue he ought to practice. He ought to spend his life on his knees, begging to be forgiven for his dirty existence. When a man thinks he’s good — that’s when he’s rotten. Pride is the worst of all sins, no matter what he’s done.”
Cherryl asks, “But what if man knows that what he’s done is good?”
Jim: “Then he ought to apologize for it.”
Cherryl: “To Whom?”
Jim: “To Those who haven’t done it.”
Cherryl: “I…. I don’t understand.”
Jim later goes on to say that “unhappiness is the hallmark of virtue.”
Owen Kellogg
Mr. Mowen, of the Amalgamated Switch and Signal Company, stood outside, watching and talking to a transient worker. The worker turns out to be Owen Kellogg. Kellogg was a competent man who worked for Taggart. Dagny was planning on promoting him. But, he quit. He refused all of her offers and wouldn’t offer a reason for his leaving. Now, we find him working at a transient laborer. Why?
When Mr. Mowen asks him what he thinks is going to happen to the world, he replies, “You wouldn’t care to know.”
The Motor
While Dagny and Rearden are on vacation together, they go to the Twentieth Century Motor Company. While there, Dagny finds a motor that “would draw static electricity from the atmosphere, convert it and create its own power as it went along.” The motor is in bad shape and the manuscript is half gone. The motor could have “set the whole country in motion and on fire.”
Odd Metaphor
“She had stood there silently, watching, without interest or purpose, like a chemical compound on a photographic plate, absorbing visual shapes because they were there to be absorbed, but unable ever to form any estimate of the objects of her vision.” Describing the pregnant woman in the town by the Twentieth Century Motor Company factory.
Discussion Question/Journal Entry
Owen Kellogg is one of the men of ability that disappeared. Why has he reappeared? What does it mean? Why is he working as transient labor? What philosophies and beliefs are seen from he discussion with Mr. Mowen? Where are all of the other men of talent? What is happening to them?
The English Student 