“I was thinking of people who say that happiness is impossible on earth, look how hard they struggle to find some joy in life. Look how they struggle for it. Why should any living creature exist in pain? By what conceivable right can anyone demand that a human being exist for anything but his own joy? Every one of them wants it. Every part of him wants it. But they never find it. I wonder why. They whine and say they don’t understand the meaning of life. There’s a particular kind of people that I despise. Those who seek some sort of a higher purpose or ‘universal goal’, who don’t know what to live for, who moan they must ‘find themselves’. You hear it all around us. That seems to be the official bromide of our century. Every book you open, every drooling self confession, it seems to be the noble thing to confess. I’d think it would be the most shameful one.”
“Look Gail,” Roark got up, reached out for a thick branch off a tree, held it in both hands, one fist closed at each end, then his wrists and knuckles tensed against the resistance, he bent the branch slowly into an arc. Now I can make what I want of it, a bow, a cane, a railing, that’s the meaning of life.”
“Your strength?”
“Your work,” He tossed the branch aside, “the material the earth offers and what you make of it…”
Comments