Mon., Jan. 12
Everybody’s looking really bad at school. Claire, Adi, and me couldn’t
even be arsed to bitch about anyone. And that’s when you know it’s bad.
We had a totally weird assembly in the main hall. All the teachers were
lined up around the edges and had so been told to look positive. You could
see it was killing them, specially the
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I felt the passing of time, its essence in its repetitions. Remembering the present stretches time out even more. I remembered the smell of the rain at the end of the day when Heredia, without explanation, would disappear from the ranch. I would hear his horse gallop off on the dirt road, or would see a cloud of dust that drew farther away with the carriage.
I thought: He returns who knows when, at an hour when I am deep asleep. I hear the sound of his boots on the flagstones in the corridor. He knocks on my window to wish me good night. I hear him in my dreams. While I sleep, time interrupts its conventional rhythm. In lonely places sleep gets bound up with reality. It is like the imitation of a very long life, with its memories. I have been living at this ranch with Armando Heredia for five or six days and yet it seems as if I have been living here in this house for my whole life, that I have always heard this rain, that I have always seen the sunsets, that Armando has always knocked on my window to wish me good night in the middle of my dreams.
One day during this period, Ayn received a letter, signed ““Thadeus Ashby” — a name she did not know—informing her that “Warner Brothers can’t produce The Fountainhead. I can. I must talk to you about it.” Amused when she learned that he was only twenty-one, and touched that he had read The Fountainhead while in the Air Force and was so eager to meet Ayn that he hitchhiked from New York to Hollywood to do so, Ayn agreed to meet him. The meeting went well. Ayn would later say, “He talked philosophy, he was very perceptive about The Fountainhead—he even understood that Wynand dramatized the Nietz- schean philosophy—he was very intelligent. Frank is usually more severe on first impressions and I’m more mushy, but both of us liked him.” Ayn and Frank learned that Thadeus was working on a novel and a play—but he had no money and no job. Ayn soon invited him to live with them on the ranch so that he could work there without having to hold a job. She wanted to spare a young writer a painful struggle. While Ayn never believed that charity was a moral virtue or requirement, and did not give money to organized chari- ties, she occasionally was financially helpful to people in whom she saw ability.
In later years, she gave gifts of money, informal scholarships, to young people who could not otherwise complete their educations and in whom she saw intelli- gence and promise.
Sayfa 197
It was then that the fox appeared.
“Good morning,” said the fox.
“Good morning,” the little prince responded politely, although when he turned around he saw nothing.
“I am right here,” the voice said, “under the apple tree.”
“Who are you?” asked the little prince, and added, “You are very pretty to look at.”
“I am a fox,” the
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I soon learned to know this flower better. On the little prince’s planet the flowers had always been very simple. They had only one ring of petals; they took up no room at all; they were a trouble to nobody. One morning they would appear in the grass, and by night they would have faded peacefully away. But one day, from a seed blown from no one
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