It's not the object, it's the desire

In the evening my parents and my brother were going out for some casual shopping and while getting ready my father put on a new after shave. It had a peculiar flavor of lime and it shocked me. It was something as though I had smelled this fragrance long back and it had left a powerful mark on me. I tried hard to recollect if there was something I remember connected with this fragrance, but I couldn’t. I thought about it for sometime and found nothing. I was amused. I will never use this aftershave for myself. I don’t want to confuse myself my smelling it again and again.

This happened while I was in the 501st page of The Fountainhead. I was struggling with a small sentence on the last line of that page. I read it 5-6 times and yet I was not able to get it. There were no new words - just simple vocabulary that was laughing at me. I have seen this happen before with much simpler ones and this time I was thinking about the aftershave more than the sentence. After reading it I found that I was missing a small word – ‘for’. I was so preoccupied with that smell that I was not seeing this little ‘for’. The sentence was – ‘That special sense of living I thought this marriage would destroy for me.’

The very next page made me silently thank my friends again for gifting me this book. The middle of the 502nd page had this –

‘I love you, Dominique. I love you so much that nothing can matter to me – not even you. Can you understand that? Only my love – not your answer. Not even your indifference. I have never taken much from the world. I haven’t wanted much. I’ve never really wanted anything. Not in the total, undivided way, not with the kind of desire that becomes an ultimatum, ‘yes’ or ‘no’, and one can’t accept the ‘no’ without ceasing to exist. That’s what you are to me. But when one reaches that stage, it’s not the object that matters, it’s the desire. Not you, but I. The ability to desire like that. Nothing less is worth feeling or honoring. And I’ve never felt that before. Dominique, I’ve never known how to say ‘mine’ about anything. Not in the sense I say it about you. Mine. Did you call it a sense of life as exaltation? You said that. You understand. I can’t be afraid. I love you, Dominique – I love you – you’re letting me say it now – I love you.’

Long back in one of my posts on Flowing Emotions I had written “its relations that are more important than people”. I was confused after writing that. I didn’t know if what I had written was right or wrong. One of my friends said he didn’t agree with me. I had no answer to give. I thought about it a several times ever since then. I had never been confused so much with something I had written, myself. Then I read this today. I read it several times – just to feel the pleasure of being right, to enjoy a victory, to relish an answer I had been searching. This character in The Fountainhead, though has a few bad traits, is the second of the two in the story that are close to objectiveness, and are the heroic ones. They are probably the ones that have described the philosophies of Ayn Rand. I am in the 508th page now with almost 200 more pages to go. This is what I have perceived till now about this second person – Gail Wynand. The first of course is Howard Roark.

I am spending a heck lot of a time reading this novel. It is not heck I mean here. I mean the ruthlessness the word ‘heck’ describes. I have, at many instances, read a few paragraphs very fast – using a few techniques I had learnt sometime back – but it was just out of curiosity. The zeal to get deep into the book had made me come back and read the sentences slowly again – to feel them and to learn from them, to absorb them and cherish an understanding, and capturing every part of them. It’s making me happy and proud. I don’t know about this proud thing!

My day was good today and I have learnt a lot from it. I even learnt how car batteries are charged and repaired. I learnt how to be calm when I feel the throttling urge to shout back. I learnt how weak I am.

I arranged an old table for myself in a new place. It is front of a window now from where a lot of light comes in at all times of the day. I will do all my reading and writing work here from now on. It’s beside my computer so an added advantage. I will fix a tube light tomorrow on the wall behind my computer. The light from behind me, forming a glare on the monitor, is giving me a head ache.