Day 0383

I have gone back over the painting, obliterating my careful work to move the nose and the mouth down fractionally. It has not helped and I have achieved the mask-like grotesqueness of wooden, flat, blankness that I always perpetrate when I panic and rework the entire face. It is an infinity of anguish, a constant source of struggle, pain and hardship, and it is just beyond my abilities to get right.

I have been struggling along with the breathless romanticism of The Fountainhead, which has been irritating me by failing to explore the abyssal depths of human nature, and stopping short at the upper deep. The values of hard work, aesthetic beauty, personal integrity to a belief, unrelenting determination, are presented as indissolubly good things (though this is not actually said, of course, but it feels like that is what the author thinks), and they are never challenged in their own right. Why is an architecture where form follows function without any artifice, where materials are used for specific, individual purposes, any better than any other form? It might seem abstractly logical and rational, but who said human society is logical? It isn't, from a pure perspective. But taken on its own terms, our need for ornamentation, shallowness, posturing, group-think are all perfectly logical, given what a human is and how human societies work. Why should I be made to think that there is some kind of hierarchy of what is truly good and what is merely expedient? Actually, every style, motive, dream, conviction, caprice seems equally as arbitrary as another, the more I think about it. I side with the Russian Nihilists more than this wilfully romantic conception of man as having some kind of higher nature that can be reached for and attained by only the most committed, ardent, selfish souls. Yes, it might very well seem that way, but that is just a delicious, alluring falsity, just like the pilastered facades Roarke abjures.

Peter Keating had never felt the need to formulate abstract convictions. But he had a working substitute. "A thing is not high if one can reach it; it is not great if one can reason about it; it is not deep if one can see its bottom" -this had always been his credo, unstated and unquestioned. This spared him any attempt to reach, reason or see; and it cast a nice reflection of scorn on those who made the attempt. So he was able to enjoy the work of Lois Cook. He felt uplifted by the knowledge of his own capacity to respond to the abstract, the profound, the ideal. Toohey had said: "That's just it, sound as sound, the poetry of words as words, style as a revolt against style. But only the finest spirit can appreciate it, Peter." Keating thought he could talk on this book to his friends, and if they did not understand he would know that he was superior to them. He would not need to explain that superiority-that's just it, "superiority as superiority"-automatically denied to those who asked for explanations. He loved the book.
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead