The Atlanteans

That title was for a script I wrote many years ago, but it also fits our topic.

A few days ago I ran across a youtube video of a brilliant pianist, Valentina Lisitsa, and my eye was caught by her very unique style of playing. Look at this lovely performance of Chopin's Nocturne in D Flat Major (Op. 27, No. 2), and pay close attention to her hands. It's the fluid motion of her hands that mesmerized me:



I've spent three days watching those hands.

Now watch this video of her performance of Grieg's 1st Concerto (in 3 parts on youtube):
Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:


It was this superb performance that first attracted my attention. I've always liked Rubinstein's interpretation but it sounds lifeless compared to Lisitsa's. Watching her hands -- she makes it look effortless, though I was a little taken aback at first by the somewhat (I thought) theatrical style.

Then I noticed this fascinating comment by someone on the web page for the first movement:

"The secret of her success is that she is completely relaxing her muscles after each stroke. This technique comes from Liszt and she understood how to preserve her from muscular problems. In her repertory are the most physique pieces existing and she does them brilliant. This capacity of relaxing allows her to go on without problems (Horowitz could not...)"

She has many dozens of videos up on youtube right now if you want to hear her play, and in just a few years she's acquired many fans from every country on Earth. Many of the videos are being produced right now as an explicit means to promote her career, but they are of very high quality, like that first one, and a real delight to watch.

After listening to the Grieg Concerto I had to know a little more, and I immediately found this charming interview:



Watching this, I was struck by how unpretentious she is, and by her repose--an utterly relaxed self-confidence and assurance that reminded me distinctly of interviews with Ayn Rand. She says,

"I think of myself as an American pianist", 

and

"My technique is unusual and I didn't learn it from anyone. In fact my teachers tried to fight me all the way ... I get so offended when people try to assign me to certain schools of play... no, no, no! And Russian school, definitely not!"

These things are never accidents. A Ukrainian by birth, she was 3 years and some months old when she started learning to play. She's now a proud American citizen and resident of rural North Carolina where she lives with her husband. Combined with the romanticism in the music, the pieces all started falling into place for me.

Here's another thoroughly charming interview where she explicitly states something  I figured out from a comment she made elsewhere, that she has a photographic memory--when she plays, she sees the sheet music in her mind, and even sees the pages turning!  This partly explains how she learned 24 Chopin Etudes from scratch in about a month...  But if you watch the interview, you'll get much more insight into who she is, what it was like to grow up in Russia, where classical music was like a competitive sport, what music school itself was like (she did everything the opposite of what her teachers taught her), and why she gave up a parallel ambition to play competitive chess-- she found herself looking for the most beautiful moves rather than the best moves!



In a brief biography on her web page, she lists Rachmaninoff and Chopin as among her favorite composers (an affection I strongly share), so let's return to that first video of Chopin's haunting nocturne and you will see some of the romanticism again. I noticed that she posted the following comment on youtube:

"I went through love-hate "relationship" with this Nocturne. When I was asked by Lanaudiere Fesitval to select 7 Nocturnes for the concert (I never played any before -- to my utter shame) I had to quickly flip through the sheet music and pick ones I thought I might stand :-) This one was number "last" on my list of things to do. I didn't start learning it until it was almost too late (those who watched my webcast of practice can confirm :-)). I dreaded the moment when I will get sick and tired of this sweetest thing ever written with its gorgeous but repetitious melody....

"Then I had my "eureka" moment. It happened when I started looking at Chopin's metronome markings -- in all other Nocturnes they were perfectly in sync with today's consensus -- maybe little faster here, slower there... But this one -- oh my God! Lento Sostenuto marked as 50 beats per minute in half-measure (150BPM in eights). You know how fast is it???? Check it out and see if you can keep up with Mr. Chopin LOL ..... I can't , I still play it waaaaaay under tempo. Let's see how many "critics" will leave comments saying it is too fast .....But , no matter what, it makes a perfect sense-- and suddenly my dread turned into astonishment at Chopin's genius. The whole piece is suddenly transformed from overly long sugary-syrupy chant to an exalted and impassioned speech- you make whatever you want of this speech, maybe it is a declaration of love? After all -- the piece ends with the most beautiful duet of two voices...."

How many people use words like "exalted" and "impassioned", or phrases like "declaration of love"? I know one.

Now listen to one of my favorite Rachmaninoff preludes (G minor, Op.23 no.5), performed absolutely brilliantly in an off-the-cuff performance:



Then contrast with this encore performance (her third encore) of the same piece in Seoul (where she performed the Grieg Concerto):



Or listen to Chopin's nocturne in E Flat Major (Op.9 No.2), another favorite of mine to play:



When I was watching some of these, another thought struck me -- she's not really playing the piano.

She's making love to it.

Watch her entire body. I've never seen anything like that before. Watch her lips -- she speaks silently to the piano while playing some of these pieces, especially the tender ones.

And Chopin's beautiful "Berceuse" lullaby in D Flat Major (Op 57):



Here's a brilliant performance of one of my favorites -- Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody no. 2. The speed of her hands in this defies my imagination.



Again, it was her hands that captivated me in all these pieces. I confess I've watched them over and over again. As I said, they're mesmerizing.

If you want a greater sense of her virtuousity (this is mainly for the pianists out there), watch and listen as she plays my favorite concerto of all--Rachmaninoff's 2nd... without the orchestra!


Part 2:

Part 3:


Wait till you get to the very end of the third movement! The hands are moving so fast they're a blur.

Here's another example of that, the third movement of Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata, which I've always enjoyed playing (it has a dramatic intrigue I like, and a flow when you play it that's very enjoyable):



Or the conflict presented in the first movement to Sonata Appassionata, another that I used to like to play (it's been a long time):



I can't fault anything about how she plays this. Not a note.
(Click here for parts 2 and 3.)

When I watch these videos (and all of them are best watched full screen -- they are beautifully produced high definition video!) my nose is rubbed into the fact that someone like Valentina Lisitsa is so far above a self-taught dilletante duffer like me that she might as well be in another galaxy on the other side of the universe.  But it's a nose-rubbing I'll take any time and any place so long as I can see a glimpse of greatness through my hobbyist telescope -- I worship at the altar of ability.

There's much more on youtube, but as a follow-up to all this, here's another interesting 25 minute documentary (in three parts) of Valentina's recording of Rachmaninoff's 2nd with a full orchestra.
Part 1:

(Here is Part 2 and Part 3.)

The second part of this documentary connects to the version minus orchestra. The third part of the documentary offers some more of her criticism of the Russian music school (which she says Rachmaninoff didn't follow!) and a few outtakes at the end (the last is funny).

You may note that the musicians in this documentary are rather in awe of her ability.

In my opinion, she may be one of the finest pianists of the last century--but she's in our time, and watching her play, the full scope of the human potential just amazes me. Imagine if everyone in every field fulfilled their potential to this degree. We'd live among giants in Atlantis.


Footnote:  the day after posting this, I was listening again to her delightful performance of Rachmaninoff's "Moments Musicaux," Op 16 #2 E flat minor, and noticed this interesting comment on her approach to recording in one take:

Here is a tiny bit of Rachmaninoff -- his #2 of Moments Musicaux (I am going to perform a complete set in Montreal for Pro Musica this March 7th by the way).

No fancy camera work here -- just one (first note to the last) take from the real recording session. Just one of many takes, not necessarily the one that will end up on Rachmaninoff solo works CD (with First Sonata and miscellany of Preludes etc).

See, nowadays recording process is about basically making sure that every note is played, at least once. It can easily lead to making hundreds or even thousands of little "takes." If one person is apt to make a mistake here and there -- multiply it by orchestra members -- and you arrive into 1000+ takes. Everybody who tried to take a photo of a group with iPhone can relate to it. How many times have you have to take a picture to NOT get somebody with eyes shut or mouth open :-)

The difference between a live performance and a recording is just as vast as the difference between watching a play in a theater and a movie. All of it of course thanks to modern recording and editing equipment (in movies just as in music). It used to be different and great musicians of old times would come to studio, play just as they would for the audience (the only difference being, they could do another try if things didn't quite work on the first take) and go away with a magnificent recording. We can complain all we want about old recordings as being sloppy and full of wrong notes, messed passagework. We just have to remember that those are honest, unadulterated, unaided performances and I challenge any modern pianist who dares to laugh about old-timers to try to match the recordings of golden era without faking it with editing. We are all good singers in a shower - but if you face a set of microphones staring at you from a complete silence, and then the little light goes off -- and you are about to face your posterity without a safety net of "oh, we will clean it up later"-- and every little note that you miss, and every phrase that you don't play beautifully is going to live forever as your damnation--it can unnerve the strongest and most confident. Being a musician is fun!!!!!

And then after posting that footnote, I was listening to her excellent performance of Chopin's Fantasy in F minor (Op. 49), and saw an even more fascinating extended comment she made:

This is Chopin's response to Liszt's "Funerailles" (I know, I know, Liszt wrote it AFTER Chopin died -- so let's say it was Liszt's response to Chopin's Fantasy.) The same plan -- starting with a funeral introduction , same f -minor, same abundance of octaves... But Funerailles is a great piano war-horse, favorite of any "virtuoso" with a decent octave technique -- sure and cheap way to impress and thrill the audiences. Fantasy in comparison is a poor cousin, underappreciated and often misunderstood: the worst offenders are often female pianists (LOL, huuuuuge grin goes here) playing it in overly sentimental and romanticized way - complete with hands flailing, eyes rolling and hair flying :-) Guys just can't do it :-)

How did it happen? Liszt was a great self-promotion and marketing guy -- he discovered a neat trick of "programming" in music, forcing music "to tell a story"- and listeners suddenly thought, "Gee, now we understand what this music is about, how cool!" This was his trademark -- but it was certainly not his invention. In fact, most if not all music has a "program", something composer thought of when composing and something we think of when we listen. It can be something very concrete and extremely detailed (Berlioz Symphonie Fantastique for example) -- or just a vague hint of an idea that makes us think further (Beethoven 5th Symphony).

The problem with detailed programs is that music can become "dated", tied to a certain event that might be of no importance to future listeners. People can relate in perpetuity to "the fate knocking on the door" of the 5th symphony. But we can never again (hopefully) feel what French audience must have felt on Berlioz' premiere during the third movement with its guillotine strike. I bet their hair was standing up and Goosebumps were covering the listeners who still remembered Terror some years before... I think that even watching Avatar in 3D is nothing in comparison to that experience :-)

Chopin was much more subtle in his "programs" -- he catered to more sophisticated smaller audience of salons rather than big concert halls. These people knew the historical context and could understand him without need to spell it out. In order to fully appreciate his music we must know at least a bit of history too. Then it becomes clear that Chopin was so different from a stereotyped effeminate, sickly romantic virtuoso image. He was a true titan, not in body but in spirit -- singlehandedly (with few brethren poets, artists etc) keeping the whole people from oblivion and cultural destruction. For his people, his country, was at this time a mere geographic term. Formerly a proud and powerful nation, one of Europe superpowers, Poland has fallen so low because of internal discord that it was picked piece by piece by strong and brutal neighbors until it disappeared. New "owners" were bent on wiping national identity and pride to secure their new acquisitions. They would have succeeded was it not for Chopin.

You know that musicologists call him a first" national" composer. For a good reason -- he created an epic of his nation in music just as Homer created his in Odyssey or Virgil in Aeneid... And we are not only talking about things like Polonaises or Mazurkas fitting into this "national" category. Fantasy is a prime example of thinly veiled national music. Why? Bear with me while I take you through last foray into history. Chopin and his family ended up in a part of Poland that was grabbed by Russian Empire. He traveled abroad with Russian passport (Chopin, a Russian composer? LOL) and he had to lie on his exit visa application (yes, I am serious) that he is in transit to New World, Americas. He lived for almost whole his life with a stamp "in Transit".

The single event in history that changed his life was Polish uprising of 1830-31, a noble but doomed to fail attempt by patriots to overthrow occupying forces. (Revolutionary Etude was written the night he got the news of Russian Cossacks entering Warsaw, he didn't know if his family even survived all carnage and rape.) The rebels was brutally destroyed and all the hope of freedom was lost. Chopin realized that he will never see his native land -- or even his family. All his life he was carrying in his soul -- and in his music -- the memory of this event and of its unsung heroes. Fantasy is an ode to all those who lost their lives in the fight for freedom.

I find these comments the most interesting -- they give the artist and her music much more depth, and  meaning to me.

Footnote 2: Another interesting comment is attached to this lovely nocturne in C minor by Chopin (Op. 48, No. 1):

One of Chopin's most priceless performance remarks is at the beginning of this Nocturne -- "sotto voce". Just like that: not a girlish "piano", not an ambivalent "mezzo forte", not even meaty forte (the last thing you want here is an "opera" voice for this melody). It effectively bars all over-the-top cheap and showy "expressive emotions" -- no eye rolling allowed, no hair flailing, no hands flying, no sobs, no visible tears.... A musical equivalent of the famed British "keeping a stiff upper lip"-- this "sotto voce" gives us the right sense of what this piece is about. Just as Chopin's 2nd sonata, this nocturne deals directly and openly with such tragic subjects as death, loss and grief ... except, here you are allowed to leave personal comments. 2nd sonata is a depiction of all those things, this Nocturne is a commentary -- or an epitaph..... the fifth movement that would come after the Finale ...If you ever visit La Madeleine in Paris (Chopin's parish church where his funeral was held on October 30th) think about this Nocturne, OK? 

PS: Talking about parallels between Rachmaninoff and Chopin works, don't you think that "doppio movimento" part ( last pages) sounds ominously like Rachmaninoff Etude-Tableau E flat Minor Op39?

One other thing I like in these commentaries is that the music is not something that exists just in isolation like an abstraction divorced from concretes, but it has a history and a meaning to her that goes so far as visiting these places. And in that I can find my own expanded meaning.



And connecting to this, by fortuitous coincidence, is the interview that just came out yesterday:



Footnote 3: I might as well add this fascinating comment she made about Chopin's C Sharp minor Nocturne (op 27, #1)  that I actually discovered before adding the last two:

This is an enigma of a nocturne. There are many things written about it , all trying to explain it away, to make sense of it. You probably heard about " death in Venice, murder perhaps.. ....body silently covered by soft waves while the moon keeps shining etc ".....Ah, all this romantic stuff -- I will add just my two cents worth, no more ... 

If nocturnes are indeed songs of love, this one has strong undertones of jealousy, betrayal and, ultimately, death. 

It hauntingly fascinating -- but you can't call it beautiful. Just think about the melody here -- where is it??? And can you call this strange and gratingly chromatic chant a melody? Or .... another question, which key IS it -- C sharp minor or major? Is it a half-smile or half-cry? ...The melody very soon becomes a duet -- and then middle part comes all of a sudden as a violent burst of energy and action. I don't recall any other piece of Chopin (supposedly effeminate and weakling invalid of a composer) where he would use triple forte- fortissimo so boldly (that is like FFF forte!) The octave recitative in the left hand before the recap sounds like a curse. The most telling and poignant remark however is reserved for the very last "words" of the duet before the coda: Chopin writes "con duolo" (with grief) - the last farewell of unhappy lovers perhaps... 

PS: For those visual people (like myself LOL) here is a perfect visual match: type pre-Raphaelites into Google image search -- you will see "Ophelia" and many others that fit the mood and color of the piece perfectly. 

PSPS: On understanding composer's intent: Chopin often uses remark "con anima". Don't mix it with "animato" . Yes, the root is the same but the meaning and action is opposite. It was made very clear in this nocturne -- in the middle part there are measures marked "con anima" and then come the ones marked "stretto"."Con anima" bars are slowing down. He treated con anima literally -- "with soul" -- not "in an animated way". Russian language has a better direct translation "душевно"! 

I had looked up "pre-Raphaelite" paintings in Google after first reading this, and her description was perfect, but about two days after reading it, I woke up late after working till 4AM, and one sip of microwaved two-day old coffee later, I suddenly realized I hadn't a clue what the term "pre-Raphaelite" meant.  So I searched again, and came up with this interesting explanation off of Wiki:

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (also known as the Pre-Raphaelites) was a group of English painters, poets, and critics, founded in 1848 by William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti. The three founders were soon joined by William Michael Rossetti, James Collinson, Frederic George Stephens and Thomas Woolner to form a seven-member "brotherhood". 

The group's intention was to reform art by rejecting what they considered to be the mechanistic approach first adopted by the Mannerist artists who succeeded Raphael and Michelangelo. They believed that the Classical poses and elegant compositions of Raphael in particular had been a corrupting influence on the academic teaching of art. Hence the name: Pre-Raphaelite. In particular, they objected to the influence of Sir Joshua Reynolds, the founder of the English Royal Academy of Arts, whom they called "Sir Sloshua".  

To the Pre-Raphaelites, according to William Michael Rossetti, "sloshy" meant "anything lax or scamped in the process of painting ... and hence ... any thing or person of a commonplace or conventional kind". In contrast, they wanted to return to the abundant detail, intense colours, and complex compositions of Quattrocento Italian and Flemish art. 

The Pre-Raphaelites have been considered the first avant-garde movement in art, though they have also been denied that status[citation needed], because they continued to accept both the concepts of history painting and of mimesis, or imitation of nature, as central to the purpose of art. However, the Pre-Raphaelites undoubtedly defined themselves as a reform-movement, created a distinct name for their form of art, and published a periodical, The Germ, to promote their ideas. Their debates were recorded in the Pre-Raphaelite Journal. 

The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was founded in John Millais's parents' house on Gower Street, London in 1848. ... They kept the existence of the Brotherhood secret from members of the Royal Academy. 

The Brotherhood's early doctrines were expressed in four declarations:

1. to have genuine ideas to express;
2. to study Nature attentively, so as to know how to express them;
3. to sympathise with what is direct and serious and heartfelt in previous art, to the exclusion of what is conventional and self-parodying and learned by rote;
4. most indispensable of all, to produce thoroughly good pictures and statues.

These principles are deliberately non-dogmatic, since the Brotherhood wished to emphasise the personal responsibility of individual artists to determine their own ideas and methods of depiction. Influenced by Romanticism, they thought that freedom and responsibility were inseparable.  

Nevertheless, they were particularly fascinated by medieval culture, believing it to possess a spiritual and creative integrity that had been lost in later eras. This emphasis on medieval culture was to clash with certain principles of realism, which stress the independent observation of nature.  

In its early stages, the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood believed that their two interests were consistent with one another, but in later years the movement divided and began to move in two directions. The realist-side was led by Hunt and Millais, while the medievalist-side was led by Rossetti and his followers, Edward Burne-Jones and William Morris. This split was never absolute, since both factions believed that art was essentially spiritual in character, opposing their idealism to the materialist realism associated with Courbet and Impressionism.
In their attempts to revive the brilliance of colour found in Quattrocento art, Hunt and Millais developed a technique of painting in thin glazes of pigment over a wet white ground. They hoped that in this way their colours would retain jewel-like transparency and clarity. This emphasis on brilliance of colour was in reaction to the excessive use of bitumen by earlier British artists, such as Reynolds, David Wilkie and Benjamin Robert Haydon. Bitumen produces unstable areas of muddy darkness, an effect that the Pre-Raphaelites despised.
...all members of the Brotherhood signed works with their name and the initials "PRB". Between January and April 1850, the group published a literary magazine, "The Germ". ...
In 1850 the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood became controversial after the exhibition of Millais's painting Christ In The House Of His Parents, considered to be blasphemous by many reviewers, notably Charles Dickens.[3] ...Their medievalism was attacked as backward-looking and their extreme devotion to detail was condemned as ugly and jarring to the eye. According to Dickens, Millais made the Holy Family look like alcoholics and slum-dwellers, adopting contorted and absurd "medieval" poses.  

...The movement influenced the work of many later British artists well into the twentieth century... some claim, strongly influenced the young J.R.R. Tolkien... 

In the twentieth century artistic ideals changed and art moved away from representing reality. Since the Pre-Raphaelites were fixed on portraying things with near-photographic precision, though with a distinctive attention to detailed surface-patterns, their work was devalued by many painters and critics. In particular, after the First World War, British Modernists associated Pre-Raphaelite art with the repressive and backward times in which they grew up...

 Now that was interesting, and again, it lends even more insight into the musician, and her own work.

Footnote 4 (August 6):
This next video caught my eye for one reason: it shows better than almost any other how hard Lisitsa concentrates. Note especially how much she has her eyes closed--as I noted previously, she has a photographic memory and reads the music while playing, but in her head. And it shows more of how she speaks to herself while playing, and her very fluid technique, a method of relaxation and precision.

As I also noted, she normally practices 12 hours a day--because that's what she enjoys doing, to the exclusion of almost everything else. You can see it via her website -- she's put up videos of entire practice sessions, and I recommend them for anyone looking for insights into how someone becomes great at what they do. I think too many people simply have no idea--they imagine it's a little more work over the average person, a little more innate talent.



I mention all this because a topic of longtime interest to me is -- what makes greatness? I observe at least three essentials: total passion for one thing; extremely focused, consistent and precise effort to grasp what they are doing and how they do it; and an utterly dedicated work regimen.

I'm tempted to add: unusual intelligence and some unique ability that most people don't have (like photographic memory), but I'm not sure these are essential. Given the first three and a very good natural endowment of intelligence, I think the "unusual" part develops in time, especially if someone starts early enough in life. (Lisitsa started at age 3.) Some "natural" ability will help initially energize the passion, then the passion will drive the ability, and passion and ability together will drive the dedication, and all three will feed on each other.

Exceptional instruction is important, but I think a fourth possible essential factor is that the great person usually has some very early insight into the key principles of what they do so well that quickly puts them beyond the need for much instruction. This gives them a big jump in their starting point, and early confidence and enjoyment.

Footnote 5 (10/19/2011):
I just have to add one more comment. This develops the psychology of greatness somewhat more.  Early in this post I echoed the comment of another fan of Valentina's, who remarked that her hand technique was a form of relaxation--anyone who's played the piano knows that difficult pieces can cause cramping in your arms or hands if you don't do some kind of relaxation while you play.  But I was never fully satisfied with this explanation.  She was using the technique on easy pieces, too.

Then I had a flash of insight the other day.  Two comments she made starting resonating in my head.  First, was her anecdote about giving up a potential career in chess because she found herself looking for the most beautiful moves rather than the best moves.  Second, was her comment that she is a very visual person--code, in part, for the fact that she has a photographic memory (which I'm terribly jealous of), but the meaning is deeper--she's a very visual person.  Because of her photographic memory or not, she's a very visual person.

Put those two pieces together in the context of a technique that she herself acknowledges is very unusual, which her teachers couldn't break her of -- and you get:  a visually beautiful technique.   That is, I think she strives to bring beauty to more than the sounds -- she strives to bring beauty to the fluid movement of her hands while she plays.  I don't mean this in terms of any kind of theatricality for the audience, which had been my first unfair impression.  I mean she strives to play beautifully.  Sound and sight. Not primarily for her audience.  I think she does it primarily for--herself.  As I remarked, she makes love to the piano.

A Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe

Guts and Self-confidence vs. The Cowardly Lion

I have an infinite number of double categories to describe people, in one of my favorite phrases, "There's two kinds of people...," but the one I will dwell on here in particular are those who want to know what reality is, and those who don't.

People that want to be efficacious and successful in life fall into the first category. Those that don't give a damn about any kind of success, existential, spiritual or otherwise, fall into the second.

I think this categorical distinction applies to both Christians and the Left, among whom advocates of reason hope to make inroads. People make errors, but in the first category, it's errors of knowledge or reasoning that lead them to believe "God" or "Marxism" is somehow representative of what reality is, and so they are sucked in to the miasma of faith in God or faith in Society.

Errors of metaphysics. A malevolent universe premise might especially predispose them, but many other factors come to play.

What I'm suggesting is that before engaging in discussion with someone, it's fruitful to first determine what category someone falls into, to know the basic premise at work.  If you know someone is struggling to identify the true nature of reality so that they can be successful in life (at a much deeper and broader level than economic success), that can help focus your arguments towards them.  If you know they aren't, don't waste your time.

This is why I never dismiss people out of hand just because they call themselves "Christians" or "Very Left". Buried deep down inside, hidden from view there may be a solid core of allegiance to reality and reason buried somewhere, and I've seen and known too many people who suddenly "got it" and said, "I was wrong -- to hell with that!"

Literally.

This makes it all the more ridiculous when I see, as I have lately, so many avowed Objectivists running around and condemning other Objectivists over nuanced differences of opinion on complex subjects. They seem to have decided that reason is not their forte and have dedicated themselves to the proposition that emotion, condemnation and ostracism is preferable to an argument. In theory, it ought to be easier to have a reasoned argument with someone who agrees with you on 99% of the corpus of Ayn Rand's works rather than someone raised on, say, Catholicism or Marx.

While I'm on my rant, I note that this approach was so not what Ayn Rand did. She would engage with anyone, and took the larger view of her long-term objectives when she did it.

For instance, recently a story was recounted by Harry Binswanger of AR's appearance with [philosopher] John Hospers at a major university. Hospers behaved as a royal ass, and according to Harry, AR gave a very reasoned response to him. On other occasions (for instance, the famous Phil Donahue interview) AR would make an issue of rudeness -- but she never ran. As Harry tells it, she didn't walk away from Hospers, either, though he certainly deserved it in spades. No. He wasn't the audience. He was the means to the bigger audience. Instead, she ignored his rudeness and gave reasoned responses to her main audience -- everyone else in the auditorium.

Contrasts in approach can be very effective to convince people just who is the more reasoned.

More Objectivists need to remember this. I'm not pointing fingers at anyone here, but at the larger audience. Public conflict is a way to reach a lot of people, that is, that "first category" of people that I was talking about.

Unfortunately, lately I'm seeing too many Objectivists online (ie, Facebook, or as it ought to be called, "In Your Face with a Book") giving up on reasoned arguments and substituting the uppity "about-face" to diss others instead. It's so easy after all. You don't need to think or reason or put together a coherent response. You just demand they agree with you on everything, and if they don't, you slap them in the face with a haughty air of moral superiority and walk away.

Brilliant.

Yes, there's a formula for impressing the world with Ayn Rand's philosophy -- claim to be her advocate and then practice the opposite of what she did in her own life. I can just hear what she would have said to that.

But I don't think any of those who are doing it would have had the guts to do it in her presence.

For an example of greater guts and and self-confidence, look at Francisco d'Anconia. A man who always had an answer in any social situation -- and he never ran away, even when surrounded by wolves.

    Standing unnoticed on the edge of the group, Rearden heard a woman, who had large diamond earrings and a flabby, nervous face, ask tensely, "Senior d'Anconia, what do you think is going to happen to the world?"
    "Just exactly what it deserves,"
    "Oh, how cruel!"
    "Don't you believe in the operation of the moral law, madame?" Francisco asked gravely. "I do."
    Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil--and he's the typical product of money."
    Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.
    "So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Anconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money?...
    There were people who had listened, but now hurried away, and people who said, "It's horrible!"--"It's not true!"--"How vicious and selfish!"--saying it loudly and guardedly at once, as if wishing that their neighbors would hear them, but hoping that Francisco would not.
    "Senor d'Anconia," declared the woman with the earrings, "I don't agree with you!"
    "If you can refute a single sentence I uttered, madame, I shall hear it gratefully."
    "Oh, I can't answer you. I don't have any answers, my mind doesn't work that way, but I don't feel that you're right, so I know that you're wrong."
    "How do you know it?"
    "I feel it. I don't go by my head, but by my heart. You might be good at logic, but you're heartless."
    "Madame, when we'll see men dying of starvation around us, your heart won't be of any earthly use to save them. And I'm heartless enough to say that when you'll scream, 'But I didn't know it!'--you will not be forgiven."
    The woman turned away, a shudder running through the flesh of her cheeks and through the angry tremor of her voice: "Well, it's certainly a funny way to talk at a party!"
    A portly man with evasive eyes said loudly, his tone of forced cheerfulness suggesting that his sole concern in any issue was not to let it become unpleasant, "If this is the way you feel about money, senor, I think I'm darn glad that I've got a goodly piece of d'Anconia Copper stock."
    Francisco said gravely, "I suggest that you think twice, sir."

His opponents did the running. Not Francisco. (And of course, this was Ayn Rand.)

But it does require a much greater self-confidence and knowledge and committment to reason.

---- Postscript ----
The day after posting my comments above, a friend remarked that Ayn Rand did break off with John Hospers, with the implicit question of whether that refuted my argument. I replied:

____, yes, Ayn Rand did break off relations with Hospers -- as she absolutely should have. Hospers demonstrated an extreme form of dishonesty. But I don't think this can be equated to a lot of the superficially childish histrionics that takes place on Facebook.

And merely because AR had every right to walk out of that auditorium the moment Hospers pulled the stunt he did, she didn't blindly exercise that right without considering what would advance her greater goals -- she was above all, rational. She had an audience, and a forum, and bad as Hospers behaved, she had an opportunity to reach many active minds with a reasoned argument. She seized it.

How many people on Facebook do that? Instead of using disagreement and conflict as a chance to set an example, to make a reasoned point that will impress others with the rightness of their point of view and with their dedication to reason, they oh-so-often degenerate immediately into name-calling, "de-friending" and moral posturing to prove who is the most loyal supporter of this or that person.

Give me one example where Ayn Rand ever engaged in that kind of sycophantic behavior? Or one example where Leonard Peikoff ever did it? 

In any case, AR's dissassociating from Hospers makes the point my comment started with -- which category of people was Hospers in? Those with fealty to reality, or those with fealty to whim? Clearly the latter, as he revealed. That he concealed it from her showed he was irredeemably dishonest. He was a lost cause.

We could psychologize his motives, or AR's motives for dealing with him in the first place (I doubt she was completely unaware of his intellectual dishonesty -- she was too smart for that) but it's irrelevant, because the second point of my comment remains correct: there's a lot of behavior from Objectivists or wannabees that is completely contrary to Ayn Rand's own approach to spreading ideas or persuading people, and I think they ought to know it.

To put it bluntly: they are acting as a discredit to reason, to her philosophy, and to her memory. They don't practice what they preach, they don't practice what she preached, and they don't practice what she practiced. They are acting as   very   poor  advocates for Objectivism. 

AR upheld reason, not just as a process of thought in the cloistered isolation of one's mind in an airtight room with the door sealed shut, but also as a means of rational persuasion -- to be out there in the world building arguments to reach people, because it's only by reaching people that we can effect cultural change. I'm not fabricating any motives for her here. She wrote about it enough, as when she said (in "What Can One Do?" -- in her book, Philosophy: Who Needs It) that people should speak out in any forum, in any way they can. She also wrote major novels to that same end.

But what's the point of anyone else following her example to build a base of intellectual support for the principle of reason (which was above all else what she stood for) if they then go around condemning and ostracising everyone who lacks the omniscience to see how to properly apply those principles 30 seconds after learning their validity?

It's just asininely ridiculous.

Hell, I couldn't get every electrical engineer on the planet to agree on the application of Ohm's Law in every instance (I could tell stories). But I don't respond by climbing on my soap box and shouting into a megaphone that they're worthless individuals who deserve to burn in hell and anyone who thinks otherwise or consorts with the guilty or consorts with those who consort with the guilty (ad infinitum) shall burn with them. No. I build something that works. There's my ultimate argument and my proof.

Obviously, if someone is dishonest -- sure. You dissassociate, and that might (emphasize "might") demand some public statement. Sometimes, even if someone is basically honest but incapable of following a reasoned argument for whatever reason of predisposition, or is simply rude or obnoxious, you might dissassociate just because they're irritating and maintaining contact does nothing to advance your agenda -- but that doesn't require public displays of breast-beating accompanied by a Tarzan yell of their moral worthlessness. You just pull away until such time as they start behaving as adults and keep open the possibility that they will clean up their act with time, maturity, thought and greater understanding.

But a lot of the "de-friending" and other infantile behavior I'm seeing doesn't even rise to this level. It's got the most superficial kind of rationalization to support it, which amounts to the psychology of a bully who can't marshall a reasoned response to someone more eloquent, so he resorts to the only weapon in his arsenal of ideas -- a punch in the nose. I notice a common thread of this, over and over and over again, among too many of those who climb on a soap box and revert to condemnation when they can't find the words to persuade another mind, as if their failure to construct a reasoned argument is prima facie evidence that the target of their condemnation is dishonest and unreachable.

That's just absurd.

Persuasive, logical arguments that overcome the psychological hurdles of an opponent's entire lifetime of thinking are extremely difficult to construct. Rarely -- and I do mean rarely -- can one ever persuade another of the rightness of one's point of view in a brief conversation (or email exchange). The most you can normally hope to do is plant the seeds for an eventual enlightenment. That's certainly how I approach it. First I try to establish whether my audience is basically honest and whether they have some committment to reality, and then I try to approach them as equals in a way that can be summarized as "have you ever considered this fact, this logic, this point of view?"  

I don't demand agreement, I don't try to construct the comprehensive bullet-proof argument, I only ask that they consider thinking about some point or two. I try to show respect for their intelligence and their ability to think independently, and for their life-experience -- because it can really be hard for people to overcome mental baggage. (I include myself here.) 

I find this a far more successful means of persuasion than condemning everyone who won't agree with me after 5 minutes of discussion. 

And it's only by working at this for years and years do you get better at it. Reasoned, persuasive argument is hard. It takes a lot of thought on how to do it, and a lot of practice doing it.

But you do have to engage with others who disagree with you to get better at it. No one gets that practice by getting mad and giving up, which is what most of the de-friending is all about. That is, giving-up because verbal apoplexy or aphasia forces them to confront an undeveloped cognitive faculty that makes them feel embarassed, inadequate and inferior -- to be an advocate of reason who can't reason. This makes much of the condemnation and ostracism nothing more than an evasion to avoid confronting the loss of self-esteem in their own eyes or their peers' eyes.

I could slice and dice this ad infinitum, but my original comment, like this one, was an off-the-cuff remark that wasn't intended to be a comprehensive discussion, just something to make people think about what they are doing.

Answering the Exhortations of a Moral Leech

In response to a commenter over at PJ who exhorted us all to sacrifice as our "brother's keeper", in response to this excellent op-ed by Beth Haynes in opposition to Medicare, I said:

Who is the "brother" we are obligated to be keeping?

Is it a common criminal, a moocher, a looter, a bureaucrat, or just the average guy who votes for Obama so that we can all be enslaved to provide for our "brothers" at the point of a government gun?

Or is the "brother" we are keeping someone we value -- a family member, a close friend, an acquaintence who shares our own convictions and ideas and values and returns the favor with love or appreciation or simply the inspiration of their own integrity, goodness or other virtue?

The first example is a sacrifice. The second is not.

No one should be sacrificing. We should be trading -- exchanging value for value, including the spiritual values of honesty, integrity, independence and justice.

If we help someone -- to the extent we can afford it -- it is justice to their character that make them deserving.

But to insert the dictates of the government into that equation short-circuits the entire process of individual judgment. If I can't judge who deserves my help by my standards and by my judgment of what I can afford to help them, all becomes sacrifice. I become a slave to their need and a slave to the bureaucrat who forces me to help them at the point of his gun.

To quote John Galt (Atlas Shrugged),

"I am the man who loves his life. I am the man who does not sacrifice his love or his values. ...You have cried that man's sins are destroying the world and you have cursed human nature for its unwillingness to practice the virtues you demanded. Since virtue, to you, consists of sacrifice, you have demanded more sacrifices at every successive disaster. In the name of a return to morality, you have sacrificed all those evils which you held as the cause of your plight. 

"You have sacrificed justice to mercy. You have sacrificed independence to unity. You have sacrificed reason to faith. You have sacrificed wealth to need. You have sacrificed self-esteem to self-denial. You have sacrificed happiness to duty. 

"You have destroyed all that which you held to be evil and achieved all that which you held to be good. Why, then, do you shrink in horror from the sight of the world around you? That world is not the product of your sins, it is the product and the image of your virtues. It is your moral ideal brought into reality in its full and final perfection. You have fought for it, you have dreamed of it, you have wished it, and I -I am the man who has granted you your wish. 

"Whoever is now within reach of my voice, whoever is man the victim, not man the killer, I am speaking at the deathbed of your mind, at the brink of that darkness in which you're drowning, and if there still remains within you the power to struggle to hold on to those fading sparks which had been yourself--use it now. 

"The word that has destroyed you is 'sacrifice.' Use the last of your strength to understand its meaning. You're still alive. You have a chance. 

"'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the worthless, but of the precious. 'Sacrifice' does not mean the rejection of the evil for the sake of the good, but of the good for the sake of the evil. 'Sacrifice' is the surrender of that which you value in favor of that which you don't.

"....To achieve the virtue of sacrifice, you must want to live, you must love it, you must burn with passion for this earth and for all the splendor it can give you--you must feel the twist of every knife as it slashes your desires away from your reach and drains your love out of your body. It is not mere death that the morality of sacrifice holds out to you as an ideal, but death by slow torture. 

"...this double-jointed, double-standard morality splits you in half, so it splits mankind into two enemy camps: one is you, the other is all the rest of humanity. You are the only outcast who has no right to wish or live. You are the only servant, the rest are the masters, you are the only giver, the rest are the takers, you are the eternal debtor, the rest are the creditors never to be paid off. You must not question their right to your sacrifice, or the nature of their wishes and their needs: their right is conferred upon them by a negative, by the fact that they are 'non-you.' 

"...Your code declares that the rational man must sacrifice himself to the irrational, the independent man to parasites, the honest man to the dishonest, the man of justice to the unjust, the productive man to thieving loafers, the man of integrity to compromising knaves, the man of self-esteem to sniveling neurotics. Do you wonder at the meanness of soul in those you see around you? The man who achieves these virtues will not accept your moral code; the man who accepts your moral code will not achieve these virtues. 

"...Such is your morality of sacrifice and such are the twin ideals it offers: to refashion the life of your body in the image of a human stockyards, and the life of your spirit in the image of a dump. 

"..."This country--the product of reason--could not survive on the morality of sacrifice. It was not built by men who sought self-immolation or by men who sought handouts. It could not stand on the mystic split that divorced man's soul from his body. It could not live by the mystic doctrine that damned this earth as evil and those who succeeded on earth as depraved. 

"...In the name of the best within you, do not sacrifice this world to those who are its worst. In the name of the values that keep you alive, do not let your vision of man be distorted by the ugly, the cowardly, the mindless in those who have never achieved his title. ...man's proper estate is an upright posture, an intransigent mind and a step that travels unlimited roads."

The Death of Childhood

Reading an excellent editorial over at Capitalism Magazine on Obama's end-game to destroy Israel ("Obama's Vision of the Middle East Means The Death of Israel"), I was once again reminded that the one thing that needs more emphasis in the commentataries on Obama's "objectives" or "intentions" is what columnist Ed Cline more than hints at -- the one key fact of Obama that most people can't seem to get their heads around, or refuse to consider as "conspiratorial", "unbelievable", "impossible":  that Obama's intentions are not the random result of ignorance or incompetence, but have the deliberate, conscious and purposeful goal of destruction.

Why?

I've spoken about it more than a few times on this blog. (See especially "Good Night, America", but as a sampling of others, "Obama's End Game", "Obama's Communist Past", "Yet ANOTHER commie in Comrade Barack's closet", and for some real insight into who he could be working for, "How to Brainwash a Nation" and "KGB Today".)

In the case of Israel, his objective is the destruction of Israel, pure and simple.  In the case of the United States, whether by profligate spending to bankrupt us, evisceration of our nuclear arsenal to make us defenseless (coming soon, evisceration of our conventional arsenal, too), or a healthcare law that is the germ of a future totalitarianism to enslave us, his goal is the literal destruction of the United States.

No one wants to say that.  It's too "conspiratorial" and "unthinkable". If you're really naive, you'll say "mean-spirited."

I won't dwell here on the motivations for the apparent nihilism of Obama (is it nihilism if you do it in the service of some existential master?), but it has to be answered at some point to better understand the danger he poses everyone--even his own supporters.  (For deeper motivations, read "Good Night, America.") But whoever or whatever he serves, what Obama stands for, even if he doesn't know it himself, is the primordial creature that has been stalking mankind for thousands of years, and which is now ready to pounce once again.

If I may paraphrase maybe too generously from Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead", it has to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-imposed delusion -- that Obama is simply "misguided" and "inexperienced" but is still "well-intentioned". He isn't. And our lives depend on everyone understanding that.

The Role of “The Hook” in Story Writing

Ayn Rand’s 1968 essay, “Basic Principles of Literature” (reprinted in The Romantic Manifesto) discussed plot, theme, style and characterization in story-writing.  It developed the fundamental principles behind these attributes in a good novel, though at a very abstract level--by analogy, at the level that Newton’s Laws of motion and Maxwell’s equations of electromagnetics are to applied physics.  The information in this essay is essential if you want to be a writer, but not nearly enough for anyone to learn to be a writer.  A foundation for becoming one, no more.

Her essay is perhaps most well-known for its comparison of a scene in her novel The Fountainhead—to the same scene written from a different perspective of characterization in the protagonist, Howard Roark.  To a lesser degree, her essay is also known for comparing the stylization of scenes by Thomas Wolfe and Mickey Spillane, to illustrate their approaches to concretizing detail vs. presenting evaluations to a reader—an excerpt from one of the novels of Spillane (who was a good friend of ARs) illustrates a method that counts on an active mind and which doesn’t attempt to substitute the writer’s evaluations for your own, by means of selective presentation of perceptions and conceptual identifications.  Wolfe, in contrast, is the archetype of the un-focused writer who, unable to dissect his own evaluations, merely repeats what he feels and expects you to feel along.   As Rand wrote,

Let us compare the literary style of two excerpts from two different novels [One Lonely Night, by Spillane, and The Web and the Rock, by Wolfe], reproduced below. Both are descriptions of the same subject: New York City at night. Observe which one of them re-creates the visual reality of a specific scene, and which one deals with vague, emotional assertions and floating abstractions.

First excerpt [Spillane]:

Nobody ever walked across the bridge, not on a night like this. The rain was misty enough to be almost fog-like, a cold gray curtain that separated me from the pale ovals of white that were faces locked behind the steamed-up windows of the cars that hissed by. Even the brilliance that was Manhattan by night was reduced to a few sleepy, yellow lights off in the distance.

Some place over there I had left my car and started walking, burying my head in the collar of my raincoat, with the night pulled in around me like a blanket. I walked and I smoked and I flipped the spent butts ahead of me and watched them arch to the pavement and fizzle out with one last wink.

Second excerpt [Wolfe]:

That hour, that moment, and that place struck with a peerless co-incision upon the very heart of his own youth, the crest and zenith of his own desire. The city had never seemed as beautiful as it looked that night. For the first time he saw that New York was supremely, among the cities of the world, the city of the night. There had been achieved here a loveliness that was astounding and incomparable, a kind of modern beauty, inherent to its place and time, that no other place nor time could match. He realized suddenly that the beauty of other cities of the night—of Paris spread below one from the butte of Sacre-Coeur, in its vast, mysterious blossoms of nocturnal radiance; of London with its smoky nimbus of fogged light, which was so peculiarly thrilling because it was so vast, so lost in the illimitable—had each its special quality, so lovely and mysterious, but had yet produced no beauty that could equal this.

As a footnote, this particular comparison is mildly notable from a historical perspective, because, according to some accounts, Barbara Branden loved the works of Wolfe and was offended by AR’s criticism of him.  

I won’t quote everything AR said about these two paragraphs, but this much she said is relevant to the discussion here:

...Observe the difference in their methods. There is not a single emotional word or adjective in Spillane's description; he presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness. Wolfe does not describe the city; he does not give us a single characteristic visual detail. He asserts that the city is "beautiful," but does not tell us what makes it beautiful. Such words as "beautiful," "astounding," "incomparable," "thrilling," "lovely" are estimates; in the absence of any indication of what aroused these estimates, they are arbitrary assertions and meaningless generalities.

Spillane's style is reality-oriented and addressed to an objective psycho-epistemology: he provides the facts and expects the reader to react accordingly. Wolfe's style is emotion-oriented and addressed to a subjective psycho-epistemology: he expects the reader to accept emotions divorced from facts, and to accept them second-hand.

I merely recount this as a prelude to a literary comparison I’d like to make of my own.  As I noted, the principles Ayn Rand discussed are very general—literature 101—and being a successful writer of serious Romantic fiction (that is, in the philosophical sense of Romanticism and serious in the sense of something enduring) requires so much more, that I would say Romantic fiction writing is possibly (in my opinion) the most difficult job there is for human beings to pursue.

I mean that.  It is incredibly hard to do well.  I’ve sketched some observations to support that claim in previous posts, but to summarize, there’s so much one has to know—about not merely the technical attributes of story, but also human psychology, life in general, history, philosophy, the introspective workings of your own inner psychology, and above all, your training, practice and capacity to integrate everything you know into a coherent, logical (ie, fully consistent) progression of events, with characters that are compelling and believable,  in an original plot of deep meaning for your readers (or viewers)—that at any one moment in time there’s only a few people on the planet (if that) who are capable of doing first-rank writing.   But even among the lesser writers (let’s say, best-selling popular authors and screenwriters), there’s still only a few hundred on the planet who can do the job of writing good pot-boilers.  Story writing is hard.  It requires imagination, knowledge, intelligence, a unique psychology and a lot of independence.

I’ve found over the years in my own study and practice as a wanna-be (we’re still working at it) that there’s so many things essential to good writing that I couldn’t begin to address them all here, but one that’s been of interest of late is—how do you hook your audience?

This is not an optional issue for any writer.  If you don’t hook your audience in a few moments of reading, or a few minutes after that, you don’t sell a book or a screenplay.   People simply won’t give you more time than that.  You wouldn’t give any unknown author more time than that, I guarantee it.

Fiction writing is above all about motivating your audience to read what you write. You have to sell yourself, in effect, not merely through the publisher’s own marketing (if you are so fortunate), but through the opening pages of your work.

The initial attention span of a prospective customer for your novel (or short story or screenplay) is about one short paragraph.  Fail to interest them with that much prose and that much prose alone, and they close the cover and move on.  Get them interested enough in the first paragraph and they might read a page or two.  Get them interested in a page or two and they might buy the book.   That’s how a hook works.

Try it.  I’ve done the exercise myself:  Go to a bookstore and start picking up the best-sellers.  When I do this I consciously commit to reading exactly one paragraph on page one and no more.  If that paragraph hooks me, I’ll commit to reading more.  By this method you can quickly sort out the good writers from the not so good, and decide what authors really know their craft.

You will quickly see a huge disparity between the really successful writers and those that are less successful.  Actually, even among the very successful authors there’s a huge disparity in ability to do this well.  Marketing and a large support staff (sadly) cover up a lot of sins.  That many authors can make a living with writing a poor “hook” tells you something about how forgiving the reading public can be... but they aren’t infinitely forgiving. 

If a novel is basically good, word of mouth can overcome a mediocre “hook”, for instance, but you might have a hard time getting that word of mouth working for you without a really good hook—sales won’t build rapidly if readers aren’t excited and intrigued by the opening moments in your story.  If you don’t have a track record as a best-selling author, this applies in spades—you can bet your bottom royalty payment that editors and producers won’t give an amateur more than a one page glance.

(One producer was well-known for reading scripts upside down and flipping the pages randomly—if the pattern of dark and light didn’t look right, he tossed it.  Sadly, it’s actually a pretty good system for weeding out most scripts.)

So—it’s absolutely essential  to have a good hook.  And that’s my focus here.  But what makes a good one?
Taking a cue from Ayn Rand’s essay, let me state what I think are the basic principles—of the hook.

Fundamentally, you have to interest the reader in what you write, but of course it has to be in relation to the story.  I only mention this because many bad movies ignore this and use any arbitrary element to get your attention (car chases, explosions, violence, sex, etc), and then the story diverges with no relation whatsoever to the opening.  This is a massive cheat, and the cashing-in is when the reviews come in—or the audience figures it out and stops attending—but especially when the long-term sales bottom-out too quickly.  (The miracle of modern marketing is that some low-level of long-term sales can be achieved for stinkers by appealing to the ignorant, gullible and clueless, of course, but that’s a sewer I don’t wish to dive into.)

Here’s my take on it, keeping in mind that this is only a blog-post of my thoughts, not an exhaustive treatise that can even claim to be correct in every aspect.  My approach follows the simple guideline of “who, what, where, when, why”.  (The “how” is of course, the story.)

1. You must hint the basic conflict of your story.  You have to create some crucial question in the reader’s mind not only that there is a conflict but that it’s an interesting conflict.  “How’s it going to end?” is a cliche in the industry, but so true.  You have to plant this question in your reader’s head, and you’ve got to develop it and sustain it through every page of the story. You can’t just present a didactic summary suitable for a medical conference or an episode of Dragnet.  “There was a murder.  It had to be solved.  I was the man.”  You  might begin with something so prosaic as “Fred didn’t like Mary,” but the next words you say had better say more to give a hint of why Fred didn’t like Mary, and why this will be relevant and interesting to the lives of a general audience.

2. You have to introduce the basic setting of the story—the conflict exists in a context, and you can’t understand and “get” the conflict without some grasp of the world you’re going to be entering.  You don’t have to present every detail, but you must give enough for the reader to orient himself.

3.  You have to introduce a one or more crucial characters, though they don’t have to be the main protagonists, and you must hint at their essential natures and illustrate the conflict between them.  Again, it doesn’t have to be every character, nor even the main characters, but they do have to be crucial. The standard here is to hook your audience, not educate them.

4.  You have to hint at the underlying theme of the story.  If this is a pot-boiler rather than Dostoevsky, the theme may not run deep, but usually there is something.  The message of Die Hard, for instance, was primarily “most government officials are bureaucratic morons, but a few dedicated people make all the difference.”  Think about it.  But for serious stories, the universal meaning is that which will offer the reader/viewer some guidance in their lives.  Not the level of a Tom Clancy novel (World War 3 could break out, we could all die, yadayada) but deeper—life in general and your place in the universe, insights into human nature, etc.  (See AR for a much better exposition on this point.)

5.  What questions have you raised?

Number five applies to all the previous four points and more (that’s what I mean by “hint”)—but it’s so important it simply must be included as a separate point.

Above all, you have to raise questions in the mind of the reader—questions about each of my points.  You do not try to answer these points.  You are trying to raise questions in the mind of a reader (or viewer) to make him want to discover the answers over the next 200 pages or 2 hours of viewing time.  The principle here is to appeal to an active mind that wants to understand and integrate what he’s reading (or seeing) into a coherent whole.

The information has to be highly selective, and presented rat-a-tat-tat to get their attention quickly, while allowing their mind to put the pieces together into something recognizable—but for god’s sake, don’t let them succeed!   That’s called “predictable”.  You have to let the entire story answer those questions—if you want to make a living at it.  (But of course, you’d better deliver by the end—every fact and statement better add up to a logical whole of characters of consistent motivations you understand, in a world that you can grasp, for a thematic purpose that makes sense.)

I’ll give you a very good example from Mickey Spillane’s I, the Jury.  Taking account for some writing deficiencies for his very first novel, it has a superb opening hook that any aspiring writer should pay close attention to:

    ------  I, the Jury,  page one -------

      I shook the rain from my hat and walked into the room.  Nobody said a word.  They stepped back politely and I could feel their eyes on me.  Pat Chambers was standing by the door to the bedroom trying to steady Myrna.  The girl’s body was racking with dry sobs.  I walked over and put my arms around her.

Who put her arms around her?  For what reason?  What’s happened?   Where is this room?  Why is Myrna sobbing?   Remember, this is the first paragraph for an entire novel.   Do you want to read more?

      “Take it easy, kid,” I told her.  “Come on over here and lie down.”  I led her to a studio couch that was against the far wall and sat her down.  She was in pretty bad shape. One of the uniformed cops put a pillow down for her and she stretched out.

This doesn’t develop the suspense that much, but it establishes a little more context and we know we’re at a crime scene now.  But who is talking?

      Pat motioned me over to him and pointed to the bedroom.  “In there, Mike,” he said.

After only about 10 lines, we have a pretty good idea now.  We know who Pat is, and now we have one-half a name for our narrator—Mike.

     In there.  The words hit me hard.  In there was my best friend lying on the floor dead.   The body.  Now I could call it that.  Yesterday it was Jack Williams, the guy that shared the same mud bed with me through two years of warfare in the stinking slime of the jungle.  Jack, the guy who said he’d give his right arm for a friend and did when he stopped a bastard of a Jap from slitting me in two.  He caught the bayonet in the biceps and they amputated his arm.

You see how each new detail pulls you forward in machine-gun fashion.   But no detail is enough, and each new one raises new questions.   The hook is all about creating questions in the mind of your reader in relation to a basic conflict.  The conflict here is murder.  Who was it?  And why was it?

      Pat didn’t say a word.  He let me uncover the body and feel the cold face.   For the first time in my life I felt like crying.  “Where did he get it, Pat?”
      “In the stomach.  Better not look at it.  The killer carved the nose off a forty-five and gave it to him low.”
      I threw back the sheet and a curse caught in my throat.  Jack was in shorts, his one hand still clutching his belly in agony.  The bullet went in clean, but where it came out left a hole big enough to cram a fist into.

As a diversion, note the very strong element of characterization present here:  we now know that “Mike” is the kind of man who is willing to face reality head-on:  he can look directly at the gory mess that had been his best friend.  He wants to understand exactly what happened to his best friend.  He is willing to look at a gaping hole in a nearly naked one-armed man who had once saved his life.  He wants to use his mind no matter the terrible emotional impact it will have on him.  This sets the stage for everything that follows in the novel.

All this is on page one of my edition—and reading it, I want to go on to page 2: I have too many questions to let this drop.

      Very gently I pulled the sheet back and stood up.  It wasn’t a complicated setup.  A trail of blood led from the table beside the bed to where Jack’s artificial arm lay.  Under him the throw rug was ruffled and twisted.  He had tried to drag himself along with his one arm, but never reached what he was after.
      His police positive, still in the holster, was looped over the back of the chair.  That was what he wanted.  With a slug in his gut he never gave up.
      I pointed to the rocket, overbalanced under the weight of the .38.  “Did you move the chair, Pat?”
      “No, why?”
      “It doesn’t belong there.  Don’t you see?”
      Pat looked puzzled.  “What are you getting at?”
      “That chair was over there by the bed.  I’ve been here often enough to remember that much.  After the killer shot Jack, he pulled himself toward the chair.   But the killer didn’t leave after the shooting.   He stood here and watched him grovel on the floor in agony.  Jack was after that gun but he never reached it.   He could have if the killer didn’t move it.  The trigger-happy bastard must have stood by the door laughing while Jack tried to make his last play.  He kept pulling the chair back, inch by inch, until Jack gave up.  Tormenting a guy who’s been through all sorts of hell.  Laughing.  This was no ordinary murder, Pat.  It’s as cold-blooded and as deliberate as I ever saw one.   I’m going to get the one that did this.”

And now we’re launched into the story...  We still don’t know who “Mike” is, but we’ve some idea he’s not a guy who is likely to fail. We want to know how he’ll solve this and determine the fate of the murderer—which the title of the novel provides another crucial clue for.  (That’s another closely related aspect of the “hook”.)

I don’t want to belabor the analysis.   “Analysis paralysis” is one of the biggest failings for anyone trying to learn to write.  (Or any graduate student trying to learn to think.)   But the other failing is no analysis at all—you do need to know a few things.  Nonetheless, over-analysis divorced from hard practice and contact with reality is the biggest factor undermining writing. (Speaking from personal experience, and doesn’t this essay speak to “pot, kettle, black”?)  So let me now turn to a comparison of  a couple really brilliant examples of the “hook” which I believe will be more helpful than any amount of literary dissection by me.

I want to contrast Ayn Rand’s own style to another superb author that she wrote about elsewhere in The Romantic Manifesto – Ian Fleming: the author of the James Bond novels (which bear little relation at all to any of the movies).

The novels are Atlas Shrugged and From Russia With Love.  Again, the goal here isn’t to analyze either in great detail, but to juxtapose the opening paragraphs of these two novels directly before you—to show how they work to hook the reader for two very different types of stories, that ironically possess a certain similarity in underlying themes—both deal with killers.   Atlas deals with the men of the mind going on strike against killers of the spirit, and From Russia With Love deals James Bond defending himself against an incredibly ruthless and capable Russian assassin sent to kill him.

I originally extracted both extended excerpts without any attempt to make them the same length, but it was coincidental and very interesting to me that both came out almost exactly 2500 words—that may be a useful guideline for the time any author has to hook his reader after the first paragraph on the opening page.

Now read both excerpts straight through, keeping in mind my five points of key information to convey in a hook:  1.  Basic conflict, 2. Setting,  3. Crucial characters, 4. Theme.  5.  Questions Raised. 

Also keep in mind what Ayn Rand said about how Spillane

“...presents nothing save visual facts; but he selects only those facts, only those eloquent details, which convey the visual reality of the scene and create a mood of desolate loneliness.”

You will note as you read that both she and Fleming exert this kind of perceptual selectivity par excellance.   They rely on you to build your picture of their scenes piece-by-piece, but direct you to form your own conclusions and questions based on what they give your mind to work on, and in what order.   Recall composer Richard Halley’s words to Dagny Taggart in Atlas Shrugged:

"That is the payment I demand. Not many can afford it. I don't mean your enjoyment, I don't mean your emotion—emotions be damned!—I mean your understanding and the fact that your enjoyment was of the same nature as mine, that it came from the same source: from your intelligence, from the conscious judgment of a mind able to judge my work by the standard of the same values that went to write it—I mean, not the fact that you felt, but that you felt what I wished you to feel, not the fact that you admire my work, but that you admire it for the things I wished to be admired."

And now the excerpts:

---------- Opening to From Russia With Love ------------

    The naked man who lay splayed out on his face beside the swimming pool might have been dead.
    He might have been drowned and fished out of the pool and laid out on the grass to dry while the police or the next-of-kin were summoned. Even the little pile of objects in the grass beside his head might have been his personal effects, meticulously assembled in full view so that no one should think that something had been stolen by his rescuers.
    To judge by the glittering pile, this had been, or was, a rich man. It contained the typical membership badges of the rich man's club—a money clip, made of a Mexican fifty-dollar piece and holding a substantial wad of banknotes, a well-used gold Dunhill lighter, an oval gold cigarette case with the wavy ridges and discreet turquoise button that means Fabergé, and the sort of novel a rich man pulls out of the bookcase to take into the garden—The Little Nugget—an old P. G. Wodehouse. There was also a bulky gold wristwatch on a well-used brown crocodile strap. It was a Girard-Perregaux model designed for people who like gadgets, and it had a sweep second-hand and two little windows in the face to tell the day of the month, and the month, and the phase of the moon. The story it now told was 2.30 on June 10th with the moon three-quarters full.
    A blue and green dragon-fly flashed out from among the rose bushes at the end of the garden and hovered in mid-air a few inches above the base of the man's spine. It had been attracted by the golden shimmer of the June sunshine on the ridge of fine blond hairs above the coccyx. A puff of breeze came off the sea. The tiny field of hairs bent gently. The dragon-fly darted nervously sideways and hung above the man's left shoulder, looking down. The young grass below the man's open mouth stirred. A large drop of sweat rolled down the side of the fleshy nose and dropped glittering into the grass. That was enough. The dragon-fly flashed away through the roses and over the jagged glass on top of the high garden wall. It might be good food, but it moved.
    The garden in which the man lay was about an acre of well-kept lawn surrounded on three sides by thickly banked rose bushes from which came the steady murmur of bees. Behind the drowsy noise of the bees the sea boomed softly at the bottom of the cliff at the end of the garden. There was no view of the sea from the garden—no view of anything except of the sky and the clouds above the twelve-foot wall. In fact you could only see out of the property from the two upstairs bedrooms of the villa that formed the fourth side of this very private enclosure. From them you could see a great expanse of blue water in front of you and, on either side, the upper windows of neighbouring villas and the tops of the trees in their garden—Mediterranean-type evergreen oaks, stone pines, casuarinas and an occasional palm tree.
    The villa was modern—a squat elongated box without ornament. On the garden side the flat pink-washed facade was pierced by four iron-framed windows and by a central glass door leading on to a small square of pale green glazed tiles. The tiles merged into the lawn. The other side of the villa, standing back a few yards from a dusty road, was almost identical. But on this side the four windows were barred, and the central door was of oak.
    The villa had two medium-sized bedrooms on the upper floor and on the ground floor a sitting-room and a kitchen, part of which was walled off into a lavatory. There was no bathroom.
    The drowsy luxurious silence of early afternoon was broken by the sound of a car coming down the road. It stopped in front of the villa. There was the tinny clang of a car door being slammed and the car drove on. The door bell rang twice. The naked man beside the swimming pool did not move, but, at the noise of the bell and of the departing car, his eyes had for an instant opened very wide. It was as if the eyelids had pricked up like an animal's ears. The man immediately remembered where he was and the day of the week and the time of the day. The noises were identified. The eyelids with their fringe of short, sandy eyelashes drooped drowsily back over the very pale blue, opaque, inward-looking eyes. The small cruel lips opened in a wide jaw-breaking yawn which brought saliva into the mouth. The man spat the saliva into the grass and waited.
    A young woman carrying a small string bag and dressed in a white cotton shirt and a short, unalluring blue skirt came through the glass door and strode mannishly across the glazed tiles and the stretch of lawn towards the naked man. A few yards away from him, she dropped her string bag on the grass and sat down and took off her cheap and rather dusty shoes. Then she stood up and unbuttoned her shirt and took it off and put it, neatly folded, beside the string bag.
    The girl had nothing on under the shirt. Her skin was pleasantly sunburned and her shoulders and fine breasts shone with health. When she bent her arms to undo the side-buttons of her skirt, small tufts of fair hair showed in her armpits. The impression of a healthy animal peasant girl was heightened by the chunky hips in faded blue stockinet bathing trunks and the thick short thighs and legs that were revealed when she had stripped.
    The girl put the skirt neatly beside her shirt, opened the string bag, took out an old soda-water bottle containing some heavy colourless liquid and went over to the man and knelt on the grass beside him. She poured some of the liquid, a light olive oil, scented, as was everything in that part of the world, with roses, between his shoulder blades and, after flexing her fingers like a pianist, began massaging the sterno-mastoid and the trapezius muscles at the back of the man's neck.
    It was hard work. The man was immensely strong and the bulging muscles at the base of the neck hardly yielded to the girl's thumbs even when the downward weight of her shoulders was behind them. By the time she was finished with the man she would be soaked in perspiration and so utterly exhausted that she would fall into the swimming pool and then lie down in the shade and sleep until the car came for her. But that wasn't what she minded as her hands worked automatically on across the man's back. It was her instinctive horror for the finest body she had ever seen.
    None of this horror showed in the flat, impassive face of the masseuse, and the upward-slanting black eyes under the fringe of short coarse black hair were as empty as oil slicks, but inside her the animal whimpered and cringed and her pulse-rate, if it had occurred to her to take it, would have been high.
    Once again, as so often over the past two years, she wondered why she loathed this splendid body, and once again she vaguely tried to analyse her revulsion. Perhaps this time she would get rid of feelings which she felt guiltily certain were much more unprofessional than the sexual desire some of her patients awoke in her.
    To take the small things first: his hair. She looked down at the round, smallish head on the sinewy neck. It was covered with tight red-gold curls that should have reminded her pleasantly of the formalized hair in the pictures she had seen of classical statues. But the curls were somehow too tight, too thickly pressed against each other and against the skull. They set her teeth on edge like finger-nails against pile carpet.
    And the golden curls came down so low into the back of the neck—almost (she thought in professional terms) to the fifth cervical vertebra. And there they stopped abruptly in a straight line of small stiff golden hairs.
    The girl paused to give her hands a rest and sat back on her haunches. The beautiful upper half of her body was already shining with sweat. She wiped the back of her forearm across her forehead and reached for the bottle of oil. She poured about a tablespoonful on to the small furry plateau at the base of the man's spine, flexed her fingers and bent forward again.
    This embryo tail of golden down above the cleft of the buttocks—in a lover it would have been gay, exciting, but on this man it was somehow bestial. No, reptilian. But snakes had no hair. Well, she couldn't help that. It seemed reptilian to her. She shifted her hands on down to the two mounds of the gluteal muscles. Now was the time when many of her patients, particularly the young ones on the football team, would start joking with her. Then, if she was not very careful, the suggestions would come. Sometimes she could silence these by digging sharply down towards the sciatic nerve. At other times, and particularly if she found the man attractive, there would be giggling arguments, a brief wrestling-match and a quick, delicious surrender.
    With this man it was different, almost uncannily different. From the very first he had been like a lump of inanimate meat. In two years he had never said a word to her. When she had done his back and it was time for him to turn over, neither his eyes nor his body had once shown the smallest interest in her. When she tapped his shoulder, he would just roll over and gaze at the sky through half-closed lids and occasionally let out one of the long shuddering yawns that were the only sign that he had human reactions at all.
    The girl shifted her position and slowly worked down the right leg towards the Achilles tendon. When she came to it, she looked back up the fine body. Was her revulsion only physical? Was it the reddish colour of the sunburn on the naturally milk-white skin, the sort of roast meat look? Was it the texture of the skin itself, the deep, widely spaced pores in the satiny surface? The thickly scattered orange freckles on the shoulders? Or was it the asexuality of the man? The indifference of these splendid, insolently bulging muscles? Or was it spiritual—an animal instinct telling her that inside this wonderful body there was an evil person?
    The masseuse got to her feet and stood, twisting her head slowly from side to side and flexing her shoulders. She stretched her arms out sideways and then upwards and held them for a moment to get the blood down out of them. She went to her string bag and took out a hand-towel and wiped the perspiration off her face and body.
    When she turned back to the man, he had already rolled over and now lay, his head resting on one open hand, gazing blankly at the sky. The disengaged arm was flung out on the grass, waiting for her. She walked over and knelt on the grass behind his head. She rubbed some oil into her palms, picked up the limp half-open hand and started kneading the short thick fingers.
    The girl glanced nervously sideways at the red-brown face below the crown of tight golden curls. Superficially it was all right—handsome in a butcher's-boyish way, with its full pink cheeks, upturned nose and rounded chin. But, looked at closer, there was something cruel about the thin-lipped rather pursed mouth, a pigginess about the wide nostrils in the upturned nose, and the blankness that veiled the very pale blue eyes communicated itself over the whole face and made it look drowned and morgue-like. It was, she reflected, as if someone had taken a china doll and painted its face to frighten.
    The masseuse worked up the arm to the huge biceps. Where had the man got these fantastic muscles from? Was he a boxer? What did he do with his formidable body? Rumour said this was a police villa. The two men-servants were obviously guards of some sort, although they did the cooking and the housework. Regularly every month the man went away for a few days and she would be told not to come. And from time to time she would be told to stay away for a week, or two weeks, or a month. Once, after one of these absences, the man's neck and the upper part of his body had been a mass of bruises. On another occasion the red corner of a half-healed wound had shown under a foot of surgical plaster down the ribs over his heart. She had never dared to ask about him at the hospital or in the town. When she had first been sent to the house, one of the men-servants had told her that if she spoke about what she saw she would go to prison. Back at the hospital, the Chief Superintendent, who had never recognized her existence before, had sent for her and had said the same thing. She would go to prison. The girl's strong fingers gouged nervously into the big deltoid muscle on the point of the shoulder. She had always known it was a matter of State Security. Perhaps that was what revolted her about this splendid body. Perhaps it was just fear of the organization that had the body in custody. She squeezed her eyes shut at the thought of who he might be, of what he could order to be done to her. Quickly she opened them again. He might have noticed. But the eyes gazed blankly up at the sky.
    Now—she reached for the oil—to do the face.
    The girl's thumbs had scarcely pressed into the sockets of the man's closed eyes when the telephone in the house started ringing. The sound reached impatiently out into the quiet garden. At once the man was up on one knee like a runner waiting for the gun. But he didn't move forward. The ringing stopped. There was the mutter of a voice. The girl could not hear what it was saying, but it sounded humble, noting instructions. The voice stopped and one of the men-servants showed briefly at the door, made a gesture of summons, and went back into the house. Half way through the gesture, the naked man was already running. She watched the brown back flash through the open glass door. Better not let him find her there when he came out again—doing nothing, perhaps listening. She got to her feet, took two steps to the concrete edge of the pool and dived gracefully in.
    Although it would have explained her instincts about the man whose body she massaged, it was as well for the girl's peace of mind that she did not know who he was.
    His real name was Donovan Grant, or `Red' Grant. But, for the past ten years, it had been Krassno Granitski, with the code-name of  ‘Granit’.
    He was the Chief Executioner of SMERSH, the murder apparat of the M.G.B., and at this moment he was receiving his instructions on the M.G.B. direct line with Moscow.

------- Opening to Atlas Shrugged ---------

    "Who is John Galt?"
    The light was ebbing, and Eddie Willers could not distinguish the bum's face. The bum had said it simply, without expression. But from the sunset far at the end of the street, yellow glints caught his eyes, and the eyes looked straight at Eddie Willers, mocking and still—as if the question had been addressed to the causeless uneasiness within him.
    "Why did you say that?" asked Eddie Willers, his voice tense.
    The bum leaned against the side of the doorway; a wedge of broken glass behind him reflected the metal yellow of the sky.
    "Why does it bother you?" he asked.
    "It doesn't," snapped Eddie Willers.
    He reached hastily into his pocket. The bum had stopped him and asked for a dime, then had gone on talking, as if to kill that moment and postpone the problem of the next. Pleas for dimes were so frequent in the streets these days that it was not necessary to listen to explanations, and he had no desire to hear the details of this bum's particular despair.
    "Go get your cup of coffee," he said, handing the dime to the shadow that had no face.
    "Thank you, sir," said the voice, without interest, and the face leaned forward for a moment. The face was wind-browned, cut by lines of weariness and cynical resignation; the eyes were intelligent. Eddie Willers walked on, wondering why he always felt it at this time of day, this sense of dread without reason. No, he thought, not dread, there's nothing to fear: just an immense, diffused apprehension, with no source or object. He had become accustomed to the feeling, but he could find no explanation for it; yet the bum had spoken as if he knew that Eddie felt it, as if he thought that one should feel it, and more: as if he knew the reason.
    Eddie Willers pulled his shoulders straight, in conscientious self-discipline. He had to stop this, he thought; he was beginning to imagine things. Had he always felt it? He was thirty-two years old. He tried to think back. No, he hadn't; but he could not remember when it had started. The feeling came to him Suddenly, at random intervals, and now it was coming more often than ever. It's the twilight, he thought; I hate the twilight.
    The clouds and the shafts of skyscrapers against them were turning brown, like an old painting in oil, the color of a fading masterpiece. Long streaks of grime ran from under the pinnacles down the slender, soot-eaten walls. High on the side of a tower there was a crack in the shape of a motionless lightning, the length of ten stories. A jagged object cut the sky above the roofs; it was half a spire, still holding the glow of the sunset; the gold leaf had long since peeled off the other half. The glow was red and still, like the reflection of a fire: not an active fire, but a dying one which it is too late to stop.
    No, thought Eddie Willers, there was nothing disturbing in the sight of the city. It looked as it had always looked.
    He walked on, reminding himself that he was late in returning to the office. 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 evening's 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 reassured—and 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 goods, 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 tree's 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 inside—just 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, from their first knowledge of death, pain or fear. But these had never scarred him; his shock came when he stood very quietly, looking into the black hole of the trunk. It was an immense betrayal—the more terrible because he could not grasp what it was that had been betrayed. It was not himself, he knew, nor his trust; it was something else. He stood there for a while, making no sound, then he walked back to the house. He never spoke about it to anyone, then or since.
    Eddie Willers shook his head, as the screech of a rusty mechanism changing a traffic light stopped him on the edge of a curb. He felt anger at himself. There was no reason that he had to remember the oak tree tonight. It meant nothing to him any longer, only a faint tinge of sadness—and somewhere within him, a drop of pain moving briefly and vanishing, like a raindrop on the glass of a window, its course in the shape of a question mark.
    He wanted no sadness attached to his childhood; he loved its memories: any day of it he remembered now seemed flooded by a still, brilliant sunlight. It seemed to him as if a few rays from it reached into his present: not rays, more like pinpoint spotlights that gave an occasional moment's glitter to his job, to his lonely apartment, to the quiet, scrupulous progression of his existence.
    He thought of a summer day when he was ten years old. That day, in a clearing of the woods, the one precious companion of his childhood told him what they would do when they grew up. The words were harsh and glowing, like the sunlight. He listened in admiration and in wonder. When he was asked what he would want to do, he answered at once, "Whatever is right," and added, "You ought to do something great... I mean, the two of us together."
    "What?" she asked. He said, "I don't know. That's what we ought to find out. Not just what you said. Not just business and earning a living. Things like winning battles, or saving people out of fires, or climbing mountains." "What for?" she asked. He said, "The minister said last Sunday that we must always reach for the best within us. What do you suppose is the best within us?" "I don't know." "We'll have to find out." She did not answer; she was looking away, up the railroad track.
    Eddie Willers smiled. He had said, "Whatever is right," twenty-two years ago. He had kept that statement unchallenged ever since; the other questions had faded in his mind; he had been too busy to ask them. But he still thought it self-evident that one had to do what was right; he had never learned how people could want to do otherwise; he had learned only that they did. It still seemed simple and incomprehensible to him: simple that things should be right, and incomprehensible that they weren't. He knew that they weren't. He thought of that, as he turned a corner and came to the great building of Taggart Transcontinental.
    The building stood over the street as its tallest and proudest structure. Eddie Willers always smiled at his first sight of it. Its long bands of windows were unbroken, in contrast to those of its neighbors. Its rising lines cut the sky, with no crumbling corners or worn edges. It seemed to stand above the years, untouched. It would always stand there, thought Eddie Willers.
    Whenever he entered the Taggart Building, he felt relief and a sense of security. This was a place of competence and power. The floors of its hallways were mirrors made of marble. The frosted rectangles of its electric fixtures were chips of solid light. Behind sheets of glass, rows of girls sat at typewriters, the clicking of their keys like the sound of speeding train wheels. And like an answering echo, a faint shudder went through the walls at times, rising from under the building, from the tunnels of the great terminal where trains started out to cross a continent and stopped after crossing it again, as they had started and stopped for generation after generation. Taggart Transcontinental, thought Eddie Willers, From Ocean to Ocean—the proud slogan of his childhood, so much more shining and holy than any commandment of the Bible. From Ocean to Ocean, forever—thought Eddie Willers, in the manner of a rededication, as he walked through the spotless halls into the heart of the building, into the office of James Taggart, President of Taggart Transcontinental.
    James Taggart sat at his desk. He looked like a man approaching fifty, who had crossed into age from adolescence, without the intermediate stage of youth. He had a small, petulant mouth, and thin hair clinging to a bald forehead. His posture had a limp, decentralized sloppiness, as if in defiance of his tall, slender body, a body with an elegance of line intended for the confident poise of an aristocrat, but transformed into the gawkiness of a lout. The flesh of his face was pale and soft. His eyes were pale and veiled, with a glance that moved slowly, never quite stopping, gliding off and past things in eternal resentment of their existence. He looked obstinate and drained. He was thirty-nine years old.
    He lifted his head with irritation, at the sound of the opening door.
    "Don't bother me, don't bother me, don't bother me," said James Taggart.
    Eddie Willers walked toward the desk.
    "It's important, Jim," he said, not raising his voice.
    "All right, all right, what is it?"
    Eddie Willers looked at a map on the wall of the office. The map's colors had faded under the glass—he wondered dimly how many Taggart presidents had sat before it and for how many years. The Taggart Transcontinental Railroad, the network of red lines slashing the faded body of the country from New York to San Francisco, looked like a system of blood vessels. It looked as if once, long ago, the blood had shot down the main artery and, under the pressure of its own overabundance, had branched out at random points, running all over the country. One red streak twisted its way from Cheyenne, Wyoming, down to El Paso, Texas—the Rio Norte Line of Taggart Transcontinental. New tracing had been added recently and the red streak had been extended south beyond El Paso—but Eddie Willers turned away hastily when his eyes reached that point.
    He looked at James Taggart and said, "It's the Rio Norte Line." He noticed Taggart's glance moving down to a corner of the desk. "We've had another wreck."
    "Railroad accidents happen every day. Did you have to bother me about that?"
    "You know what I'm saying, Jim. The Rio Norte is done for. That track is shot. Down the whole line."
    "We are getting a new track."
    Eddie Willers continued as if there had been no answer: "That track is shot. It's no use trying to run trains down there. People are giving up trying to use them."
    "There is not a railroad in the country, it seems to me, that doesn't have a few branches running at a deficit. We're not the only ones. It's a national condition—a temporary national condition."
    Eddie stood looking at him silently. What Taggart disliked about Eddie Willers was this habit of looking straight into people's eyes. Eddie's eyes were blue, wide and questioning; he had blond hair and a square face, unremarkable except for that look of scrupulous attentiveness and open, puzzled wonder.
    "What do you want?" snapped Taggart.
    "I just came to tell you something you had to know, because somebody had to tell you."
    "That we've had another accident?"
    "That we can't give up the Rio Norte Line."

-------- End Examples --------

Now, having read these both, do you want to read more?  That is the role of a hook.