such a terible point of view of the world

I read the book with the recommendation of my lover (thank you for such a nice recommendation). To be honest, I read the book on and off in 3 weeks period because of the uncomfortable feeling it gives.

The book tells a story of a guy (his name is Roark) who is self-confident, self-concious - “a self-believer”. He’s an architecture. He understands buildings, the asthestics and functionalities. His perspective is that architects have its own life. His endevour is to create an achitectural creature, building which has its life, functions as it should be, asthestically represents by it purposes. He gives up on his personallity when creating the creature, everything is for the sake of the creature. He was on a journey to “fight” the illness of people’s “trying to be sophisicated”, cringe, “pathetic for attention”, “power-and-money-seeking” behaviors. In the beginning, he encoutered people who does not know what they are talking about, the prestige university board who disaggreed on his way of designing building due to its uniqueness, he was outed. He was challenged by the stuborness though he knew his people. Then, He met his gang, eventually, and they becomes his sources of supports.

The book express the hateness against the community approaches in modeling society, which dismiss the contribution and uniqueness of a single person. It says that the people who tell the message to live for others are hippocrites. Because deep down, they are living for themself, the message is to take away the people’s lifelihood, dream and hope.

There is an inconsistent vision in the book. It acknowledges the greatness of cooperation, the magnificent results of collective effort (the buildings that make up the city), but it also discriminates against collective cooperation in details that promote the protagonist (creating buildings separately, disregarding cooperation in building creation). That is, collaboration somehow goes against creativity. I think this is the biggest absurdity (dilemma) of the book. Because acknowledging the creative results of all humanity as a great achievement is acknowledging the cooperation of individuals. But it discriminates against the cooperation of individuals in creating buildings together because “committees don’t work”.

I think in collective creations, adversarial relationships will benefit the development of the subject. This reminds me of the GAN machine learning model, which helps to learn about problems in detail. Besides, adversarial relationships are fully reflected everywhere in many fields with multiple participants. Moreover, these adversarial relationships should not be manipulated by both sides to create healthy development of the subject. Because we need to let that opposition develop naturally, it cannot be clearly controlled.

Miss but an hour's fated meeting, and lifetimes pass before next greeting.