Fountainhead: The Book That Gave Me the Courage to Follow My Soul

I just finished reading Fountainhead by Ayn Rand and wanted to write a blog post on what I feel it changed in me. This book has been with me for many years now. And I started it many times, too, but didn’t keep going. It’s almost mysterious that I picked up this book when I was deeply disturbed about my life in general.

I still am disturbed, but it gave me a direction to follow. The Howard Roark character has been mighty inspirational. It depicts what a man is supposed to be. He follows his soul and seeks what brings happiness to himself. Not to his wife, not to his parents, not to the society around, but only himself. His act of bombing the Cortlandt housing project because it wasn’t built as per his plans is extreme until you hear the thought behind it.

A snippet of his monologue while defending himself in the Cortlandt Housing bombing case:

I agreed to design Cortlandt for the purpose of seeing it erected as I designed it and for no other reason. That was the price I set for my work and I was not paid. 

I do not blame Peter Keating. He was helpless. He had a contract with his employers. It was ignored. He had a promise that the structure he offered would be built as designed. The promise was broken. The love of a man for the integrity of his work and his right to preserve it are now considered a vague intangible and an unessential. You have heard the prosecutor say that. Why was the building disfugured? For no reason. Such acts never have any reason, unless it's the vanity of some second-handers who feel they have a right to anyone's priperty, spiritual or material. Who permitted them to do it? No particular man among the dozens in authority. No one cared to permit it or stop it. No one was responsible. No one can be held to account. Such is the nature of all collective action.

I did not receive the payment I asked. But the owners of Cortlandt got what they needed from me. They wanted a scheme devised to build a structure as cheaply as possible. They found no one else could do it to their satisfaction. I could and did. They took the benefit of my work and made me contribute it as a gift. But I am not an altruist. I do not contribute gifts of this nature.

I came here to say that I do not recognize anyone's right to one minute of my life. Nor to any part of my energy. Nor to any achievement of mine. No matter who makes the claim, how large their number or how great their need.

I wished to come here and say that I am a man who does not exist for others.

How many of us care about the invisible price we pay? The extremely costly affair of selling our soul? That’s what Roark questions. Roark is extreme in that sense. Throughout the book, he never compromises on his thoughts on what a building should look like. On one occasion, he even gave up his architect’s job because all the commissions he was getting required modifications to his original plans. He chose to work in a stone quarry instead of modifying his plans and erecting those buildings.

The designs are a product of his thoughts. And the thoughts of his mind & soul are sacred. He finds his designs sacred.

That is the direction it pushed me towards. That the thoughts in my head are sacred. No one has the right to decide what I do with my thoughts. It doesn’t even matter what those thoughts make me. I am happy as long as I follow them.

Now, looking at my thoughts, I found a constant yearning for travelling and exploring the world. That is something I figured I could do day in and day out, even on weekends. I find so much joy in reading about places, travelling to places. I kept finding excuses, such as, I don’t have time outside of my job, I don’t have money, and I have family to look after and so on. But I felt my primary responsibility is towards my soul and nothing else. And the soul seeks the thrill of exploring new places and experiences, and I must fulfil it.

Lastly, even though I am not obliged to give anything, if I want to give something to my family and friends, I want it to be the fact that I fought hard to pursue what my soul seeks. If I want to be known, it is for that ideology to pursue what satiates me and what I can do day in day out.

That’s what this book gave me.

It gave me the courage to continue pursuing that which fills my soul and not some metric defined by society.

Leaving you with another gem of a line by Howard Roark in the book:

Nothing is given to man on earth. Everything he needs has to be produced. And here man faces his basic alternative: he can survive in only one of two ways—by the independent work of his own mind or as a parasite fed by the minds of others. The creator originates. The parasite borrows. The creator faces nature alone. The parasite faces nature through an intermediary.

You choose!