Fountainhead

I write this knowing that my words will be an understatement to what this book stands for. I write this, like always, for myself. I write this in my never ending pursuit of bridging the gap between thoughts, feelings and expressions.

Fountainhead written by Ayn Rand is a tribute to the heroic in man. A hero that exists in each of us most often drowned in the torrent of the majorities. The virtue of self-love is the root to all other legitimate emotions and thoughts. One must start by agreeing that one exists and then move on to using the 'I' in the truest sense of the word.

The world around treat their own existence with contempt and pass this on to their progeny. This is a vicious cycle with very few anomalies. These iconoclasts are antagonised to a point where it seems like living for oneself is a sacrilege. Selflessness and altruism are glorified and the world begins moving into nothingness. People become nothing but a collective void feeding on the fountainhead.

Ayn Rand has written Fountainhead for those that understand, accept and live it and not for the multitude that don't. What makes the book even more endearing is that she wrote it primarily for herself.

Roark, Dominique, Toohey and Keating are not people but symbols for attributes present within all of us. It's our choices that connect us to them. The love, passion, hate, suffering, conformism, selflessness and cruelty are all portrayed using these characters. The very fact that some can visualize and connect to the characters and the emotions that went into driving this character is a tribute to Ayn's work.

Pure, raw, unblemished thoughts, feelings and passionate individuality are what I saw in this book.

"My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being , with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest ability, and reason as his only absolute" - Ayn Rand