A few months ago, I finally got round to reading some Ayn Rand, 'The Fountainhead', something I'd been meaning to do for years and wasn't disappointed.
For me, you can't read 'The Fountainhead' and fail to be impressed by Howard Roark, the brilliant, uncompromising architect who doesn't allow his creative genius and personal integrity to be held back or prostituted by communitarian mediocrity.
What I especially like about Roark is that when the communitarian plebians repeatedly gang up on him to make his life tough, blocking his aspirations towards individual greatness, he doesn't get aggressive or cynical and bitter, he just shrugs it off and continues his pursuit of being an individual creator who refuses to be held back by the mediocre, negotiated processes of wider society. In other words, his will extends him towards what he wants to be, not what a collective bunch of others try to force him to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment