Posted by John Tchoe on September 13, 19100 at 19:47:37:

In Reply to: Simply Confused: A lost dialogue posted by Cece Shuttlesworth on September 12, 19100 at 01:41:42:

I read The Fountainhead for the first time five years ago, and am currently re-reading it. It amazes me how much just flew completely over my head the first time I read the book.

There is a "thing," a way of looking at the world and at people, which all the characters to various degrees are aware of, and talk around, but it's difficult to communicate what that "thing" is. Howard Roark, Dominique Francon, and Ellworth Toohey know completely what that "thing" is, completely. Howard Roark lives by it. Dominique tries to keep it from contamination by those who do not understand it. Toohey actively tries to undermine it.

Peter Keating is dimly aware of it at moments when he is being himself, when he's alone, or with Catherine, or with Dominique, but rather than try to understand it, he buries it, and shuts his mind off to it when he's in front of an audience.

The best way I can describe the "thing" in question is a positive, independent, heroic sense of life.

A good ogy would be "The Matrix". In "The Matrix," a fake, computer-generated world is ped off as the real one. Most people accept this as the only world possible, and it doesn't even occur to them to try to figure out why things don't quite make sense, why things seem stacked against their happiness. Except the "thing" in The Fountainhead isn't a computer-generated conspiracy, it's the nature of people's souls.

Howard Roark's soul is pure. He simply does not notice the world as it is for most people. Peter Keating--think of him as a Keanu Reeves who took the blue pill--gets a sense of this when he's with Howard, but doesn't have the courage to stand against the world as it's given to him.

I hope this doesn't confuse you more than you already are, but as I've said, it's been five years since I first read this book, and I am reading it as though whole new chapters had been added to it this time around. I understand what Peikoff means when he says he envies the new readers.

: I am currently reading the fountainhead but as always before I really get started I p through the book so that it makes it interesting for me to let myself read than to make myself read because it's required for a cl. I was a little confused When Keating said to Roark "When I'm with you, it's always like a choice. Between you and the rest of the world. I don't want that kind of a choice. I don't want to be an outsider, I want to belong..... etc." What did that mean? I mean it sounds like it has some important part of the story but I don't really realize why since I'm glancing at pages before I get there. Can Someone help me out?

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