The Pensieve

Her Second Career

“There’s no one in this [film] business ith an honest idea of what’s good and what’s bad. And there’s no one who’s not scared green of having such an idea for himself. They’re all sitting around waiting for someone to tell them. Begging someone to tell them. Anyone, just so they won’t have to take the awful responsibility of judging and valuing on their own. So merit doesn’t exist here. What does exist is someone’s ballyhoo which all the others are only too glad to follow. And the ballyhoo starts with less discrimination and from less respectable sources than the betting at a racetrack. Only this is more of a gamble, because at a track all the horses are at least given a chance to run.”

I think that this paragraph is quite true. Not many people dare to ‘break out of the mould’ or dare to do something totally off the norm. Of those who dare to, there’s always the chance that they are labelled ‘weird’, ‘odd’ or if one were kinder, ‘unique’.

Anyway, this story was really interesting. It’s about a Hollywood star and a director. In order to prove that the above quote was true, the director made a bet with the star. He would find an extra, any extra and make a star of her. While she, would temporarily give up her status, assume a different identity and start out anew. The rest of the story, I shall not reveal…

Red Pawn
This is one of the earlier stories that Ayn Rand wrote about the communist times. It’s one of the first st0ries tinged with sadness, no longer having that cheerful, light-hearted tone in her earlier stories. If one did not read carefully, one would gloss over the description below, taking it as one of Rand’s vivid descriptions. Actually, it contains the core of her philosophy…

He stood at the door. At one side of him was a painting of a saint burning at the stake, his face distorted into a smile of insane ectasy, renouncing the pleasures and tortures of the flesh for the glory of his heaven; at the other side - a poster of a huge machine with little ant-sized men, sweating at its gigantic levers, and the inscription: “Our duty is our sacrifice to the red collective of the Communistic State!”

“No!”
An extremely short story, more like selected excerpts from ‘We the Living’.

Kira’s Viking
Okay, this is one of her most poetic stories. It has a seemingly plain and simple façade, you could breeze through the few pages in minutes, yet you would not fully grasp the underlying meaning. Its with a toast that the Viking offers to all and sundry - “To a life, which is a reason unto itself.”