Head in a Fountain!

For the past few days I have been having two thoughts. That's not so bad you say? Well it isn't bad unless it is both simultaneous and different at the same time. That is the case here. I have two thoughts I can't quite put into words. The overall effect is like feeling both: happy and sad/pain and relief/ deep and shallow/high and low. Like the feeling when you put your head in a fountain: you feel cool and yet, suffocated! Okay, bad example.

But still, what started all these random ramblings was the book I started reading a couple of days back.It was The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. I didn't know what I was getting into. I had heard about it before and some said it was nice and others said it was boring. I wasn't prepared for what I was about to read. Now I can't get it out of my head. I had expected a normal everyday novel with an exaggerated ending. But instead it was... The Fountainhead!

I cannot put in words how caught up I was in the story of Howard Roark and Dominique Francon (with villainous inputs by William Toohey). If you haven't read it yet, I would recommend you do so; but be warned it is not your typical, everyday novel. It hides behind its grandeur an exciting new kind of philosophy called Objectivism. And to think the book was published in the late 1920s!

Ayn Rand portrays her concept of an ideal man, the woman for the ideal man and the villain for the ideal man. All the other characters are present merely to contrast him. She succeeds in what she set out to achieve. The birth of a new philosophy. It is said that Ayn Rand herself declared that no one would be able to achieve the standards of Howard Roark. He was just too perfectly ideal. Take a look at this book. It's worth it...