Good food for thought and soul. Review on FountainHead, The - Ayn Rand

The FountainHead came into my life over 15 years ago and I was not ready for it.  At that time, people had told me that it was all about massive ego, and had a bunch of crazy characters in it that would screw up my mind.  I read the first page and really liked the imagery of Howard Roark standing naked on the edge of a cliff on a lake and jumping in for a swim, but left the book out of fear for my sanity and my fear of ego.

I have been on a spiritual journey for 10 years now.  I have read a lot of Paulo Coelho, the Celestine Series and done a lot of meditation and self discovery.  Very recently, I reached a stage where I had started talking about knowing my self, independent of the influence of others and this book resurfaced into my life.

I read this book knowing I was ready for it and I found it to be fundamentally different from what people had told me, different even from what the book’s introduction claims it to be.  The introduction claims it to be the first book to openly espouse capitalism, but to me, it is the story of a person with a perfect, almost unreal sense of self.  Using that level of self as the beginning point of the spectrum, this book paints individuals with character traits ranging from those with a little deviation from this ideal, to the other extreme of a total absence of the self.

This book has its own brand of beauty.  It is beautiful in its starkness of comparisons between different types of human beings; in its unapologetic description of the brutality with which society tries to destroy anything or anyone that threatens to break the status quo of mental numbness that allows for an unthreatened power structure and in its description of how in the presence of complete opposition, the people with a sense of self can remain at peace while the ones with no sense of self, even in the presence of every facility and adulation that society has to offer, feel completely empty.

One of the most beautiful things in this book is its reinvention of the meaning of the word ‘selfish’ from'being comlpetely self-centered' to that of'having a sense of the SELF' and ‘selfless’ from'doing for others without thinking about one's benefit' to that of the'complete absence of the sense of the SELF'.  If used in these terms, this book rightly embraces a life of selfishness and condemns selflessness.  At the risk of being misunderstood, that is one way of life I completely agree with and had already started to try to live by it soon after which the book resurfaced into my life.

Returning to the book, I found most of the characters believable; Howard Roark, with his unmoving sense of self; the talented Sculptor(whose name I forget), in his ideals of perfection and in his humanity in not being able to fight the system; the Newspaper Baron, in his ruthless rise to power stemming as a reaction from a deprived childhood and Peter Keating, Howard's competitor, in his ‘selflessness’ or'spinelessness' that allows him to be swayed in the direction of social opinion to the point of losing his one true lady-love and eventually, his very soul.

However, two characters seemed too far fetched even by the standards of this book: Ellsworth M. Toohey and Dominique.  Toohey, though believable in his sheep-like view of the masses, simply seemed to be driven by too far-fetched a motive of destroying the best people so that society would remain blind to its own potential, allowing him to control it for his own power mania.  I found this character so fake that even as I write about Toohey, my tone seems to have acquired a tinge of fake pompousness.  And Dominique was another far-fetched character.  Sure her beauty is believable.  So is her love for integrity and the ‘self’, which allows her to fall for Roark.  But imagine being someone who destroys the one she loves to protect him from being destroyed by others.  I guess one can accept any logic if one has to, but this one is a bit out there for me.

To conclude the review, this book is definitely worth a read and is food not only for your thoughts, but also for your soul.  I can understand how this book got its cult like status and in its time rocked the boat of contemporary social thought structure.  However, as a personal experience, I honestly believe that at the tender age when I first came across this book, reading it would have screwed up my mind.  So I am glad I waited and read it when I did.