I celebrate Atlas Shrugged Day (September 2) each year by opening to a random page of Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand, and reading a passage. Here is what I found today, on pages 97–98 of the hardcover book (New York: Random House, 1957), Part I, Chapter V (“The Climax of the D’Anconias”):

When Francisco left, that summer, she thought that his departure was like the crossing of a frontier which ended his childhood: he was to start college, that fall. Her turn would come next. She felt an eager impatience touched by the excitement of fear, as if he had leaped into an unknown danger. It was like the moment, years ago, when she had seen him dive first from a rock into the Hudson, had seen him vanish under the black water and had stood, knowing that he would reappear in an instant and that it would then be her turn to follow.

She dismissed the fear; dangers, to Francisco, were merely opportunities for another brilliant performance; there were no battles he could lose, no enemies to beat him. And then she thought of a remark she had heard a few years earlier. It was a strange remark—and it was strange that the words had remained in her mind, even though she had thought them senseless at the time. The man who said it was an old professor-of mathematics, a friend of her father, who came to their country house for just that one visit. She liked his face, and she could still see the peculiar sadness in his eyes when he said to her father one evening, sitting on the terrace in the fading light, pointing to Francisco’s figure in the garden, “That boy is vulnerable. He has too great a capacity for joy. What will he do with it in a world where there’s so little occasion for it?

We do not yet live in the kind of country depicted in Atlas Shrugged. But, as the subject of my other post today illustrates, we are getting close.

Update, September 3, 2023: In a red state such as the one I live in, every moment is still an occasion for joy.