The Fountainhead

As often as I cursed audibly while reading it, I didn't hate all of the Fountainhead.

Ayn Rand and I can agree on the nobility of the human spirit. I do believe there is strength in our frail human hands. I know the fierce flame of invincibility Howard Roark likes to call pain that goes down only to a certain point.

I have not yet decided which of us has the greater hope for humanity - my puppeteer fingers or her steel heart - but I don't believe the lot of us are better off working against each other. I maintain a faith in engagement.

To make a man so unlike other men and to raise him up seems a cheat. To tell her believers that to be human is to deny your humanity feels a contradiction.

I may have a certain fondness for our weakness, for our softer spots. To feel your person shrunk to the size of a floating pea and to know your strength even then, that is the powerful, the fantastical shapeshifting, the pure magic of being human.

There remains the matter of compromise, of collaboration. For someone who exalts her fellow individual (those few among us), Ayn Rand has such hateful things to say about the masses between. I can understand how a brush with communism might color her political leanings, but to prescribe one truth for all of us, albeit an opposite truth, strikes me as small.

And so you have it. I may well be a Roark myself, as unwilling to budge as I am; I recognize the similarity of our methods.