Fire In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged

Whenever I hold a book in my hands, I feel a sensation. In the moment when I can feel its story, a fire that burns deep within my soul flares ever brighter. This fire that rages inside of me is a kind of fire the likes of which you would not find in the world, not even within the depths of the hottest volcanoes or at the core itself. This kind of fire is known as the calling of a writer.
I’ve always felt that I was born with that fire, that it was burning endlessly inside of me since I was a small girl. I have, hanging on the wall of my bedroom, a small, five-fingered shape, imprinted just deep enough into a once malleable material. Its roughly painted colours now a pale pastel. It’s a handprint trapped in time, a cast of the person I used

She writes:
Do not let your fire go out, spark by irreplaceable spark, in the hopeless swamps of the approximate, the not-quite, the not-yet, the not at all. Do not let the hero in your soul perish, in the lonely frustration for the life you deserved, but have never been able to reach.
Rand urges others to not let this fire, this passion, in your soul become extinguished just because you have not achieved what you wanted. She uses the words “spark by irreplaceable spark”, saying that when your fire goes out, it cannot be recovered, that it is “irreplaceable”. But if someone’s fire does go out, what is that person to do? Should they just move on and live their life without it because it cannot be struck up again as Rand suggests? Even though this notion was the source of all my fears, I could not accept the idea of an “irreplaceable” flame for it seemed to sentence me to an incomplete life. By Rand’s way of thinking, my fire could not be replaced and I would always feel like something would be missing and to be forever angry with myself for letting it go out. No, I could not accept this hopeless idea for there had to be a source of power, a fuel that could build my fire up again. But where is this source? The answer to this question came not from any words of a book, but from the day I ran in my school’s election for

He describes the fire as almost invisible to the “passers-by”, that others will not know of this feeling because it rages inside of only you. Whereas Rand in Atlas Shrugged says your fire is “irreplaceable”, van Gogh says that you can build it, that you can “tend that inner fire”. He suggests that you cannot rely on others to build it for you, but you have to build it yourself while you wait for others to notice it. Standing alone on that stage, having the courage to open my mouth through all my fears, I was tending to “that inner fire”. It had flared back up into its rightful flame because I had begun to turn to myself for strength. Inside, I had found a way to overcome my fears although the strangers in the audience could only see “a little smoke coming out of the chimney”. My own fire filled me, burning away every fear and every doubt that my mind held. My words, my wonderful words, streamed effortlessly, naturally, across to the strangers, and even though my words ended with my speech, my fire did