Closest to understanding...

Following on from my last post, my soulful, strong friend-in-mourning found the following excerpt in Ayn Rand's 'When Atlas Shrugged'. It spoke to her, as it does to me, and it seems the closest we'll ever get to understanding that which we don't understand:

"Every act of man's life has to be willed; the mere act of obtaining or eating his food implies that the person he preserves is worthy of being preserved; every pleasure he seeks to enjoy implies that the person who seeks it is worthy of finding enjoyment. He has no choice about his need of self-esteem, his only choice is the standard by which to gauge it. And he makes this fatal error when he switches this gauge protecting his life into the service of his own destruction, when he chooses a standard contradicting existence and sets his self-esteem against reality."
Every form of causeless self-doubt, every feeling of inferiority and secret unworthiness is, in fact man's hidden dread, of his inability to deal with existence. But the greater his terror, the more fiercely he clings to the murderous doctrines that choke him. No man can survive the moment of pronouncing himself irredeemably evil, should he do it, his next moment is insanity or suicide. To escape it - if he's chosen an irrational standard - he will fake, evade, blank out; he will cheat himself of reality, of existence, of mind; and he will ultimately cheat himself of self-esteem by struggling to preserve its illusion rather than to risk discovering its lack. To fear to face an issue is to believe that the worst is true."