"Atlas Shrugged - Ayn Rand" - читать интересную книгу автора (Rand Ayn)

He did not like the task which he had to perform on his return, but it had to
be done. So he did not attempt to delay it, but made himself walk faster.
He turned a corner. In the narrow space between the dark silhouettes of two
buildings, as in the crack of a door, he saw the page of a gigantic calendar
suspended in the sky.
It was the calendar that the mayor of New York had erected last year on the
top of a building, so that citizens might tell the day of the month as they
told the hours of the day, by glancing up at a public tower. A white
rectangle hung over the city, imparting the date to the men in the streets
below. In the rusty light of this eveningтАЩs sunset, the rectangle said:
September 2.
Eddie Willers looked away. He had never liked the sight of that calendar. It
disturbed him, in a manner he could not explain or define. The feeling seemed
to blend with his sense of uneasiness; it had the same quality.
He thought suddenly that there was some phrase, a kind of quotation, that
expressed what the calendar seemed to suggest. But he could not recall it. He
walked, groping for a sentence that hung in his mind as an empty shape. He
could neither fill it nor dismiss it. He glanced back. The white rectangle
stood above the roofs, saying in immovable finality: September 2.
Eddie Willers shifted his glance down to the street, to a vegetable pushcart
at the stoop of a brownstone house. He saw a pile of bright gold carrots and
the fresh green of onions. He saw a clean white curtain blowing at an open
window. He saw a bus turning a corner, expertly steered. He wondered why he
felt reassuredand then, why he felt the sudden, inexplicable wish that these
things were not left in the open, unprotected against the empty space above.
When he came to Fifth Avenue, he kept his eyes on the windows of the stores
he passed. There was nothing he needed or wished to buy; but he liked to see
the display of good?, any goods, objects made by men, to be used by men. He
enjoyed the sight of a prosperous street; not more than every fourth one of
the stores was out of business, its windows dark and empty.
He did not know why he suddenly thought of the oak tree. Nothing had recalled
it. But he thought of it and of his childhood summers on the Taggart estate.
He had spent most of his childhood with the Taggart children, and now he
worked for them, as his father and grandfather had worked for their father
and grandfather.
The great oak tree had stood on a hill over the Hudson, in a lonely spot of
the Taggart estate. Eddie Willers, aged seven, liked to come and look at that
tree. It had stood there for hundreds of years, and he thought it would
always stand there. Its roots clutched the hill like a fist with fingers sunk into the soil, and he thought that if a giant were to seize it by the top, he
would not be able to uproot it, but would swing the hill and the whole of the
earth with it, like a ball at the end of a string. He felt safe in the oak
treeтАЩs presence; it was a thing that nothing could change or threaten; it was
his greatest symbol of strength.
One night, lightning struck the oak tree. Eddie saw it the next morning. It
lay broken in half, and he looked into its trunk as into the mouth of a black
tunnel. The trunk was only an empty shell; its heart had rotted away long
ago; there was nothing insidejust a thin gray dust that was being dispersed
by the whim of the faintest wind. The living power had gone, and the shape it
left had not been able to stand without it.
Years later, he heard it said that children should be protected from shock,