Pain So Deep

Just read a scene in "The Fountainhead" that scorched my soul.

The kind of scene that left me numb, sitting quietly with the book in my hands, for a few seconds until I could snap my mind back  to my own reality.

Or back from my own reality.

A broken character sits in the office of a man he respects. A man of muscled individuality. The man is broken because his entire life has been a fraud. He achieved great monetary and professional success as an architect. But he never had an original thought. He succeeded by stealing other men's ideas, and by schmoozing and politicking his way to the top.

His career is fading; he has taken up painting for solace. He rented a shack in the woods and disappears there from the business world for days. Painting. Alone. It gives him peace.

He shows the paintings to this man that he respects. No one else has ever seen them. He waits quietly for an opinion without coming out and asking for one.

"He handed to Roark six of his canvasses. Roark looked at them, one after another. He took a longer time than he needed. When he could trust himself to lift his eyes, he shook his head in silent answer to the word Keating had not pronounced.

'It's too late, Peter', he said gently.

Keating nodded. 'Guess I.....knew that.'

When Keating had gone, Roark leaned against the door, closing his eyes. He was sick with pity. He had never felt this before - not when Henry Cameron collapsed in his office at his feet, not when he saw Steven Mallory sobbing on a bed before him. Those moments had been clean. But this was pity - this complete awareness of a man without worth or hope, this sense of finality, of the not to be redeemed. There was shame in this feeling - his own shame that he should have to pronounce such judgment on  man, that he should know an emotion which contained no shred of respect.

This is pity, he thought, and then he lifted his head in wonder. He thought that there must be something terribly wrong with a world in which this monstrous feeling is called a virtue."