The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand.

1/5 rating. 694 pages.

Book #41 of 2021. Read May 6, 2021.

As typical Ayn Rand, this is a story about a heroic egotist and capitalist and how feeling any emotion at all for your fellow human beings is practically communism and will inevitably lead to moral decay. Thankfully after slogging through this garbage fire since January, I’m finally done!!

I feel dirty after reading parts of this book. The lack of compassion, empathy, and morals by the characters honestly is disturbing. Ayn’s views are basically a moral black hole. But she also is a pro at making her villainous characters appear even worse. They are caricatures of lifeless people, almost automatons from one of those twilight zone episodes where the characters are immovable, unfeeling, and without reason.

Toohey, the antagonist, I think is my second least favorite character in all of literature, which is really saying something.

It’s hard to fault Ayn completely for her views on the world after suffering through the worst of Soviet communism, but I can’t even begin to see the point of this book with its disgusting treatment of the only caring person by manipulators all around her and quotes like these gems:

“One can’t love man without hating most of the creatures who pretend to bear his name.”

“When I look at the ocean, I feel the greatness of man. I think of man’s magnificent capacity that created this ship to conquer all that senseless space.”

I legitimately threw this book away when I finished.

Quotes:

“‘My dear fellow, who will let you?’

‘That’s not the point. The point is, who will stop me?’”

“You can use me, if you have to. It’s all right. It won’t change anything.”

“He thought only that he had promised to come again tomorrow and that it was an unbearably long time to wait.”

“A great building is not the private invention of some genius or other. It is merely a condensation of the spirit of a people.”

“History, my friends, does not ask questions or acquiescence. It is irrevocable, as the voice of the masses that determine it.”

“I take the only desire one can really permit oneself. Freedom, Alvah, freedom….To ask nothing. To expect nothing. To depend on nothing.”

“Of all the crafts, yours is the most important. Important, not in the amount of money you might make, not in the degree of artistic skill you might exhibit, but in the service you render to your fellow men.”

“Not by what we are shall we be judged, but by those we serve.”

“There’s nothing as important about human beings as their relations to one another…”

“Every man on earth has a soul of his own that nobody can stare at.”

“No happy person can be quite so impervious to pain.”

“We live in our minds, and existence is the attempt to bring that life into physical reality, to state it in gesture and form.”

#books #thisbooksucks #dontwasteyourtime #garbage #aynrand #capitalism #communism #roark #francon

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