The Fountainhead: The Money Quote – Dominique lays eyes on Howard
I’ll get back to reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead
The episode is also one of the most intense and exquisitely written passages in the book. The liquid cool sado-masochist Dominique gets a brief glimpse of hell, and looking up at her is an unyielding man like none she has ever met:
Because the sun was too hot, that morning, and she knew it would be hotter at the granite quarry, because she wanted to see no one and knew she would face a gang of workers, Dominique walked to the quarry. The thought of seeing it on that blazing day was revolting; she enjoyed the prospect.
When she came out of the woods to the edge of the great stone bowl, she felt as if she were thrust into an execution chamber filled with scalding steam. The heat did not come. from the sun, but from that broken cut in the earth, from the reflectors of flat ridges. Her shoulders, her head, her back, exposed to the sky, seemed cool while she felt the hot breath of the stone rising up her legs to her chin, to her nostrils. The air shimmered below, sparks of fire shot through the granite; she thought the stone was stirring, melting, running in white trickles of lava. Drills and hammers cracked the still weight of the air. It was obscene to see men on the shelves of the furnace. They did not look like workers, they looked like a chain gang serving an unspeakable sentence for some unspeakable crime. She could not turn away.
She stood, as an insult to the place below. Her dress—the color of water, a pale green-blue, too simple and expensive., its pleats exact like edges of glass—her thin heels planted wide apart on the boulders, the smooth helmet of her hair, the exaggerated fragility of her body against the sky—flaunted the fastidious coolness of the gardens and drawing rooms from which she came.
She looked down. Her eyes stopped on the orange hair of man who raised his head and looked at her.
She stood very still, because her first perception was not of sight, but of touch: the consciousness, not of a visual presence, but of a slap in the face. She held one hand awkwardly away from her body, the fingers spread wide in the air, as against a wall. She knew that she could not move until he permitted her to.
She saw his mouth and the silent contempt in the shape of his mouth; the planes of his gaunt hollow cheeks; the cold, pure brilliance of the eyes that had no trace of pity. She knew it was the most beautiful face she would ever see, because it was the abstraction of strength made visible. She felt a convulsion of anger, of protest, of resistance—and of pleasure. He stood looking up at her; it was not a glance, but an act of ownership. She thought she must let her face give him the answer he deserved. But she was looking instead, at the stone dust on his burned arms, the wet shirt clinging to his ribs, the lines of his long legs. She was thinking of those statues of men she had always sought; she was wondering what he would look like naked. She saw him looking at her as if he knew that. She thought she had found an aim in life—a sudden, sweeping hatred for that man.
So if we ever find ourselves in consultation with a cosmetic surgeon and they ask what kind of face we want, we’ll ask for that “abstraction of strength made visible” one. Yah.
Tags: The Fountainhead
Ayn Rand, Gary Cooper, Money Quote, Patricia Neal, Storytelling, The Fountainhead, fiction | bshears January 9, 2009
