Day 0389

Plodding on with the painting. Took a walk and was encumbered by a member of the public endeavouring to employ me to make some blighted website for a horse stud and fix a database, failing to read any of the signs of courteous refusal I was giving. Horrid, trivial, little, tawdry, horse-racing rot. Too much of Ayn Rand's love for a single purpose, the idea of devoting a life to an ideal, to be brought back to earth by this undignified clamour for my time! And tomorrow there will be more. To what towering heights of self-importance, conceited pride and disdainful arrogance I have ascended in my secluded life! Glorious delusion, paper-thin but enough to obscure temporarily the grey smudge of my own banality from myself.

... she felt herself screaming silently, at times, for a glimpse of human ability, a single glimpse of clean, hard, radiant competence. She had fits of tortured longing for a friend or enemy with a mind better than her own.Ayn Rand, Atlas Shrugged

The misery of knowing how strong and able one is in one's own mind, the radiant picture never to be made real. Dreams? Self-delusion? Or a murdered reality, unborn, killed by that corroding emotion without name - fear - need - dependence - hatred?
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead