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

Ryn Rand - ATLAS SHRUGGED
CHAPTER ITHE THEME 9
She sat at the window of the train, her head thrown back, one leg stretched
across to the empty seat before her. The window frame trembled with the speed
of the motion, the pane hung over empty darkness, and dots of light slashed
across the glass as luminous streaks, once in a while.
Her leg, sculptured by the tight sheen of the stocking, its long line running
straight, over an arched instep, to the tip of a foot in a high-heeled pump,
had a feminine elegance that seemed out of place in the dusty train car and
oddly incongruous with the rest of her. She wore a battered camelтАЩs hair coat
that had been expensive, wrapped shapelessly about her slender, nervous body.
The coat collar was raised to the slanting brim of her hat. A sweep of brown
hair fell back, almost touching the line of her shoulders. Her face was made
of angular planes, the shape of her mouth clear-cut, a sensual mouth held
closed with inflexible precision. She kept her hands in the coat pockets, her
posture taut, as if she resented immobility, and unfeminine, as if she were
unconscious of her own body and that it was a womanтАЩs body. She sat listening
to the music. It was a symphony of triumph. The notes flowed up, they spoke
of rising and they were the rising itself, they were the essence and the form
of upward motion, they seemed to embody every human act and thought that had
ascent as its motive. It was a sunburst of sound, breaking out of hiding and
spreading open. It had the freedom of release and the tension of purpose. It
swept space clean, and left nothing but the joy of an unobstructed effort.
Only a faint echo within the sounds spoke of that from which the music had
escaped, but spoke in laughing astonishment at the discovery that there was
no ugliness or pain, and there never had had to be. It was the song of an
immense deliverance.
She thought: For just a few momentswhile this lastsit is all right to
surrender completelyto forget everything and just permit yourself to feel.
She thought: Let godrop the controlsthis is it.
Somewhere on the edge of her mind, under the music, she heard the sound of
train wheels. They knocked in an even rhythm, every fourth knock accented, as
if stressing a conscious purpose. She could relax, because she heard the
wheels. She listened to the symphony, thinking: This is why the wheels have
to be kept going, and this is where theyтАЩre going.
She had never heard that symphony before, but she knew that it was written by
Richard Halley. She recognized the violence and the magnificent intensity.
She recognized the style of the theme; it was a clear, complex melodyat a
time when no one wrote melody any longer. . . . She sat looking up at the
ceiling of the car, but she did not see it and she had forgotten where she
was. She did not know whether she was hearing a full symphony orchestra or
only the theme; perhaps she was hearing the orchestration in her own mind.
She thought dimly that there had been premonitory echoes of this theme in all
of Richard HalleyтАЩs work, through all the years of his long struggle, to the
day, in his middle-age, when fame struck him suddenly and knocked him out.
Thisshe thought, listening to the symphony had been the goal of his
struggle. She remembered half-hinted attempts in his music, phrases that
promised it, broken bits of melody that started but never quite reached it;
when Richard Halley wrote this, he . . . She sat up straight. When did
Richard Halley write this?