Howard’s End on Route 6 ^^
Don’t you think the world has grown stale?
Don’t you think the story of man has reached an impasse?
We are cast adrift at the edge of a fruitless existential nightmare in an unending struggle and toil, and all the while asked to keep faith…what a macabre silly little joke of a diabolic interlude.
Hopeless!
“Come on in.” he had said with a complacent smile. “You and I are different, we are not like them… come sit down.” – Excuse me? I had thought to myself, how are we different and from whom? Please cut the crap, I had mumbled…
“You are a leader, I know you will go far…”
So there it was again, the dreaded confidence in my purported leadership skills! For once I wanted to follow, I had so wanted to tell him, yet I smiled in agreement — don’t give me the damn portfolio, just don’t, I had wanted to say…
…And he asked me if I had read The Fountainhead — that too! I’m an architect so I must have read The Fountainhead — I hadn’t, but I mumbled incoherently, trying to pass on something between a yes and a no… How could I have not read the damn book? Right?
Finally, beaming with the inevitable certainty only he possessed at that moment, he offered me a job, raised me to a pedestal, gave me my own damn territory, and then told me something that turned me right back around.
“…So I worked on Capitol Hill as an economist for almost ten years,” he said. “But I’m here aren’t I? This job has changed my life! Anyhow, did you know that Ayn Rand was Alan Greenspan’s teacher?”
“I didn’t know that.” I was amazed at the connection.
“Oh hell yeah, she inspired him… She was the reason he became an economist. He was just a chum before that, you know…” He continued with more detail…
But I had stopped listening… I had already made up my mind.
So here I am, having rejected yet another lucrative contract in NYC, instead holding a tattered library copy of The Fountainhead, and cutting past Ayn Rand’s 50’s dialect to Howard Roark’s heart… bristling! The American innocence, when the going was good, when architecture was indeed a noble art! — Was it ever? Oh how deluded and debutant of me to even venture there!
Yet…maybe, just maybe we can trace the fall, the going astray, and the divergent path when it all turned stale and old… When the world turned gray…
“Yet,” I thunder with plea as I pound my fists on the lectern, with art deco rays radiating behind my head, “should we not ignite the dark with our souls?”
[Low-angle shot lit with upturned floodlights below the lectern, casting large flickering shadows behind me]
“Don’t you think there’s still a chance with every life to make it right? Don’t you? I’m counting on you!”
-IAT
…um, arch porn… alas! LMAO!!
