The Fountainhead

I blame a lot of it on Ayn Rand. I think picking up The Fountainhead that day was the most fateful thing I did this year. Once I picked it up, I didn't stop. I didn't want to believe her. I fought desperately to just let it be a story. I summoned all my mental effort to stop it, but really I knew it was inevitable from the first page, and sure enough I was speechless, caught with my pants down, caught without the comfort of a counter argument.

It ruined everything, putting into action a endless chain of events that seemed so patiently to be waiting for me to read that first page. It's the scary inevitability of Faust, the feeling that you are moving towards something dark, yet you feel you cannot stop it because you're terrified of that one shred of truth that you really believe is truth, and it dominates you so much that you reach a point where you cannot turn your back on it, and you begin to consider whether or not it might actually be worth selling your soul for it. It seems so inevitable, the intellectual journey, so Calvinist, so outside of the control of the individual will that when it happens you realize it had already left its mark of deja vu. It's the same phenomenon I experience with the Christian God- a sense in which I will one day inevitably and unreservedly bow down before my recognized master. Yet the intervening time is war, a war to figure out whether or not he really is my true master, the true master. I think he's smiling at me.

The story of Howard Roark, the architect, is, in many ways, the story of my time in Santiago Atitlan. I see a people, at times desperately poor, living in a state of complete submission. I hear it in the pain of the reverberated moans of the women who come to the church every morning as I am working in the garden, and how they are pinned, hook, line, and sinker, to the passionate play-acting that comes from behind the pulpit. But what is even more terrifying is that they are willing to bow down to me. They do it every day. It requires a lot of self honesty to ask the question of whether or not I like this. The answer fills me with terror.

Is this submission good? Is this self-sacrifice good? Hay valores y hay anti-valores. ¿Come es que los sabemos? I'll never forget that.

I think in my life, there are only two forces that motivate me; the desire for happiness, and the desire for truth. I'm just gonna say it; they're mutually exclusive. I think the man who can tell me which is better should be seated at the right hand of God.

Reading The Fountainhead brought about a close to a period in which I was searching only for happiness and re-opened the painfully sore history I have of searching for truth. For that, I have once again become profoundly restless, significantly isolated, and at times even hysterically neurotic. It's the most painful book I've ever read. I haven't recovered. I'm heading home soon.

But was I really fighting it? Am I fighting it? Was Faust really fighting his own damnation? Could he have? Should he have? I can't answer that.

Quotes from The Fountainhead

"From the wheel to the skyscraper, everything we are and everything we have comes from a single attribute of man - the function of his reasoning mind."

"Throughout the centuries there were men who took first steps down new roads armed with nothing but their own vision. Their goals differed, but they all had this in common: that the step was first, the road new, the vision unborrowed, and the response they received--hatred. The great creators--the thinkers, the artists, the scientists, the inventors--stood alone against the men of their time. Every great new thought was opposed. Every great new invention was denounced. The first motor was considered foolish. The first airplane was considered impossible. The power loom was considered vicious. Anesthesia was considered sinful. But the men of unborrowed vision went ahead. They fought, they suffered and they paid. But they won."

"I have come here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life.... It had to be said. The world is perishing from an orgy of self-sacrificing." - Howard Roark

"She could not have reached this white serenity except as the sum of all the colors, of all the violence she had known."

"It stands to reason that where there's sacrifice, there's someone collecting sacrificial offerings. Where there's service, there's someone being served. The man who speaks to you of sacrifice, speaks of slaves and masters. And intends to be the master." -Roark

"What’s the most horrible experience you can imagine? To me- it’s being left, unarmed, in a sealed cell with a drooling beast of prey or a maniac who’s has some disease that’s eaten his brain out. You’d have nothing but your own voice- your voice and your thought. You’d scream to that creature why it should not touch you, you’d have the most eloquent words, the unanswerable words, you’d become the vessel of the absolute truth. And you’d see living eyes watching you and you’d know that the thing can’t hear you, that it can’t be reached, not reached, not in any way, yet it’s breathing and moving there before you with a purpose of its own. That’s horror. Well, that’s what’s hanging over the world, prowling somewhere through mankind, that same thing, something closed, mindless, utterly wanton, but something with an aim and cunning of it’s own."

"No creator was prompted by a desire to serve his brothers, for his brothers rejected the gift he offered and that gift destroyed the slothful routine of their lives. His truth was his only motive."

"The creators were not selfless. It is the whole secret of their power-that it was self-sufficient, self-motivated, self-generated. A first cause, a fount of energy, a life force, a Prime Mover. The creator served nothing and no one. He lived for himself."

"You know, there's a thing that stumps me. You're the coldest man I know. And I can't understand why--knowing that you're actually a fiend in your quiet sort of way--why I always feel, when I see you, that you're the most life-giving person I've ever met." -Mallory talking to Roark

"If you want my advice, Peter, you've made a mistake already. By asking me. By asking anyone. Never ask people. Not about your work. Don't you know what you want? How can you stand it, not to know?" -Roark to Keating

"Do you always have to have a purpose? Do you always have to be so damn serious? Can't you ever do things without reason, just like everybody else? You're so serious, so old. Everything's important with you, everything's great, significant in some way, every minute, even when you keep still. Can't you ever be comfortable--and unimportant?""No."

-Keating, then Roark

"We never need to say anything to each other when we're together. This is- for the time when we won't be together. I love you, Dominique. As selfishly as the fact that I exist. As selfishly as my lungs breath air. I breathe for my own necessity, for the fuel of my body, for my survival. I've given you not my sacrifice or my pity, but my ego and my naked need. This is the only way you can wish to be loved. This is the only way I can want you to love me." Roark to Dominique

"Surely you've seen through that particular stupidity. I mean the one that claims the pig is the symbol of love for humanity--the creature that accepts anything. As a matter of fact, the person who loves everybody and feels at home everywhere is the true hater of mankind. He expects nothing of men, so no form of depravity can outrage him."

• Gail Wynand

"One can't love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name. It's one or the other. One doesn't love God and sacrilege impartially. Except when one doesn't know that sacrilege has been committed. Because one doesn't know God."

• Gail Wynand

"...love is reverence, and worship, and glory, and the upward glance. Not a bandage for dirty sores. But they don't know it. Those who speak of love most promiscuously are the ones who've never felt it. They make some sort of feeble stew out of sympathy, compassion, contempt and general indifference, and they call it love. Once you've felt what it means to love as you and I know it--the total passion for the total height--you're incapable of anything less."

• Gail Wynand, speaking to Dominique Keating

"You've never felt how small you were when looking at the ocean."
He laughed. "Never. Nor looking at the planets. Nor at mountain peaks. Nor at the Grand Canyon. Why should I? When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man's magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space. When I look at mountain peaks, I think of tunnels and dynamite. When I look at the planets, I think of airplanes."

• Dominique Keating and Gail Wynand

"This is pity," he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue.

• Howard Roark

"Altruism is the doctrine which demands that man live for others and place others above self."

• Howard Roark

"I'm not an altruist,Gail. I don't decide for others."

• Howard Roark to Gail Wynand

"I could die for you. But I couldn't, and wouldn't, live for you."

• Howard Roark