Only Down To A Certain Point (the Fountainhead)

[iouswuoibev]

Roark and Wynand both describe how their pain "only goes down to a certain point." This is my understanding of what this refers to.

It is about rationality and the fact that rationality leads to enduring happiness. Enduring because you know what you are and how you will react to any given thing. Consequently, an active mind is like a battle armour, where even if something terrible happens to you, you only take a partial blow rather than full disembowelment.

Is this what Rand intended or did I misunderstand?

[JMeganSnow]

This is referring to what Ayn Rand called the "benevolent universe premise".

It's not so much that you know in advance how you'll react to things (by definition, it's impossible to expect the unexpected), it's that you know, at bottom, that whatever happens you CAN think, understand it, and act.

Throughout the book Dominique acts on the opposite premise, the "malevolent universe", meaning that, no matter what you do, you are doomed to failure and corruption; it is why she fought to destroy Roark, because she could not bear to see him achieve knowing that the pinnacle would be forever denied him, and that his eventual crash would be all the worse for coming at a greater height.

That is also why it was so significant at the end of the book when she told Roark that she hurt, but it only went down so far . . .

[Andrew Joseph Sandberg]

Joy is the feeling of being alive. The rational man knows that his mind(soul) is a tool for survival, and therefore so long as he lives he will not allow pain to be an embedded part of his soul. The man who identifies life with suffering has made a compromise between life and death, between self and non-self.