The Fountainhead

I was up until 4 AM reading Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead. It's hard to think of anything else, or see anything else. It's hard to bend my mind back into its usual grooves. One incongruous thought keeps popping up... Rand's book reminds me of Phantom of the Opera. Now why should that be?

Her book is clean lines and intensity. It is pure in that it is single-minded; it is not pure in that it is not, as it meant to be, truth. It is not truth, but it is perhaps the only bearable lie left to our society. It is the worship of Man, as heroic, as excellent.

It would have made me sick if I had read it at eighteen. It would have made me angry if I had read it at nineteen. It would have shaken me if I had read it a semester and a half ago. Now, it only makes me sad. Sad and admiring, in a way, because Rand wanted it so badly, tried so hard.

Brilliant. Hard. But without integrity, which is the only thing that she demanded. She couldn't achieve the only thing, the only thing, that she craved... and the only thing left to give her is what she did not ever want.

Pity.