Reading Ayn Rand again

Do we understand deeply when we are unto something thick with emotional? Or do we need some distance to go deep into anything? Emotions make one feel intense and intimate. But to go deep and map the contours I think a free mind unbiased helps much more. 'Biased' need not be always against but can be also 'attuned'.

After a long gap of time and interest I saw the opening lines of Fountainhead by Ayn Rand. What a sheer poetry! But why did I lose it before in those days when I was emotionally so intimate with the book? When the whole passages used to chime in memory at the drop of any excuse.. Does passionate holding on to anything blinds us to the facts facing us? Mind in its working is always a mystery.

'Howard Roark laughed.
He stood naked at the edge of a cliff.
The lake lay far below him.
A frozen explosion of granite burst in flight to the sky over motionless water.
The water seemed immovable, the stone flowing. The stone had the stillness of one brief moment in battle when thrust meets thrust and the currents are held in a pause more dynamic than motion.
The stone glowed, wet with sunrays.
The lake below was only a thin steel ring that cut the rocks in half.
The rocks went on into the depth, unchanged. They began and ended in the sky. So that the world seemed suspended in space, an island floating on nothing, anchored to the feet of the man on the cliff.
His body leaned back against the sky.
It was a body of long straight lines and angles, each curve broken into planes.
He stood, rigid, his hands hanging at his sides, palms out.
He felt his shoulder blades drawn tight together, the curve of his neck, and the weight of the blood in his hands.
He felt the wind behind him, in the hollow of his spine.
The wind waved his hair against the sky.
His hair was neither blond nor red, but the exact color of ripe orange rind.
He laughed at the thing which had happened to him that morning and at the things which now lay ahead.'
(Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead, Opening lines)

How controlled and puissant are the lines flowing like the molten steel before becoming ingots jolting the index of industry!

The unusual juxtapositions of the stream vs the stone and the granite and the human presence firmly footing - suggesting the axial change of perspective going to come out in the novel.

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