Home Beauty Home

The Fountainhead , part 1, chapter 12 T he Wynand newspaper chain, trying to boost its sales and publicity, decides to run an exposé of living conditions in New York’s slums. The editor-in- chief Alvah Scarret assigns Dominique Francon , who’s his favorite columnist, to do an investigation. Although Dominique is used to living in the lap of luxury, she agrees to spend two weeks living in a run-down tenement on the East Side, washing up in a tin bath, peeling potatoes in a shared kitchen, mingling with the poor people who live there and getting to know them. At the end of two weeks she returned to her penthouse apartment on the roof of a hotel over Central Park, and her articles on life in the slums appeared in the Banner. They were a merciless, brilliant account. She heard baffled questions at a dinner party. “My dear, you didn’t actually write those things?” “Dominique, you didn’t really live in that place?” “Oh, yes,” she answered. “The house you own on East Twelfth Street , Mrs. P...

I once saw Redbeard riding his skateboard along Otay Lakes Road . It was close to midnight, there were only a few cars on the road, and the light from the streetlamps was dim. As he snaked his way down the slope, hands in his pocket, moving toward the Sweetwater Valley —where he sleeps against the wall of the Circle K, or holds his signs along the 805 exit for spare change or spreads the good news to the people of the jungle — I thought of a verse he once shared with me, a Psalm of promises from God: For He shall give His angels charge over you, To keep you in all your ways. In their hands they shall bear you up, Lest you dash your foot against a stone. You shall tread upon the lion and the cobra, The young lion and the serpent you shall trample underfoot. When I first met Redbeard he was sitting still on a patch of grass, legs outstretched, under the shade of a large clump of bamboo-like Arundo donax , alongside a drainage ditch next to the southbound 805 freeway exit onto Bonita Roa...