We stole the candle from the larder of the Home of the Street Sweepers. The walls are cracked and water runs upon them in thin threads without sound, black and glistening as blood. And now there is nothing here save our one body, and it is strange to see only two legs stretched on the ground, and on the wall before us the shadow of our one head. The laws say that none among men may be alone, ever and at any time, for this is the great transgression and the root of all evil. Nothing moves in this tunnel save our hand on the paper. The flame of the candle stands still in the air. What punishment awaits us if it be discovered we know not, for no such crime has come in the memory of men and there are no laws to provide for it. We have committed a greater crime, and for this crime there is no name. May we be forgiven!īut this is not the only sin upon us. The laws say that men may not write unless the Council of Vocations bid them so. And we know well that there is no transgression blacker than to do or think alone. It is as if we were speaking alone to no ears but our own. It is a sin to think words no others think and to put them down upon a paper no others are to see. The nicest thing about this book was that it was mercifully short.It is a sin to write this.

Nietzsche, of course, is not an absolutist, but his 'will to power' is a primal scream returning us to our true instincts for the value of the individual over the group and Rand would embrace that part of his philosophy as well as a lot of other things within Nietzsche's philosophy. Both clearly have a post-modern and anti-humanist take on the world and each dislike major aspects of the Enlightenment.

Their premises are different but their conclusions definitely overlap. To think otherwise is to always remain a fifth grader. Sometimes equality matters sometimes we feel like hugging that horse when it gets beaten (Nietzsche's last sane act). Freedom as a goal in itself for just the sake of freedom is sort of silly.

At first one loves that kind of talk, but then one realizes she really means it. All of Rand's themes that pop up in her other books, pop up within this short book. Love at first sight is the only love she seems to recognize, equality is bad and liberty (freedom) is the only pure good, the ego rules supreme, our lives must have work in order to be happy, and a variation of the Galtism 'I swear by my life and love of it, that I will never sacrifice for another and neither expect some one to do the same for me'. The story is only there to bring out Rand's absolutist (Objectivism) worldview. Sure there's something about a light bulb, and a street cleaner and other odds and ends that unfold in a Spartan like world similar to what Plato laid out in his Republic.

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