Life!

At the age of 13, Lydia fell in love with a grand opera tenor. She kept his pictureon her dresser, with a single red rose in a thin crystal glass beside it. At the age of fifteen, she fell in love with Saint Francis of Assisi, who talked to birds and helped the poor, and she dreamed of entering the convent.

Kira had never been in love. The only hero she had known was a Viking whose story she had read as a child; a Viking whose eyes never looked farther than the point of his sword, but there was no boundary for the point of his sword; a Viking who walked through life, breaking barriers and reaping victories, who walked through ruins while the sun made a crown over his head, but he walked, light and straight, without noticing his weight; a Viking who laughed at kings, who laughed at priests, who looked at heaven only when he bent for a drink over a mountain brook and there, overshadowing the sky, he saw his own picture; a Viking who lived but for the joy and the wonder and the glory of the god that was himself.

Kira did not remember the books she read before that legend; she did not want to remember the ones she read after it. But through the years that followed, she remembered the end of the legend: when the Viking stood on a tower over a city he had conquered. The Viking smiled as men smile when they look up at heaven; but he looked down. His right arm was one straight line with his lowered sword; his left arm straight as the sword, raised a goblet of wine to the sky. The first rays of a coming sun, still unseen to the earth, struck the crystal goblet. It sparkled like a white torch. It's rays lighted the faces of those below. "To a life," said the Viking, "which is a reason unto itself."

- Ayn Rand, We the Living