My Hero...

Excerpt from Ayn Rand's 'The Fountainhead':

>> Snip>>

Ellsworth Toohey: We're alone. Why don't you tell me what you think of me.
Howard Roark: But I don't think of you.

>> Snip>>

Great men don't live in the eyes of other people; i.e., they don't exist for others. Howard Roark is the epitome of Greatness, a tribute to man's ego and a rebuke to all the 'Second-handers' of this world. Says Ayn Rand, of Howard Roark: "My philosophy, in essence, is the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute".

I've always wanted to lead a 'Roarkesque' life; albeit with little success and maybe that's why I took to this book so much. I don't necessarily agree with all the notions put forth by Ayn Rand, but in Howard Roark, I have found an idol, a paragon of manhood and an inexhaustible fountainhead of strength to derive from.

Says Rand: “It does not matter that only a few in each generation will grasp and achieve the full reality of man's proper stature-and the rest will betray it. It is those few that move the world and give life its meaning-and it is those few that I have always sought to address. The rest are no concern of mine; it is not me or The Fountainhead that they will betray: it is their own souls.”