I usually think of Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged as being similar because the themes are similar and the characters have similar roles. It occurred to me today that they are opposite in one way. AS shrugged is about tangible things, while Fountainhead is about art. I liked Fountainhead slightly better, maybe because I read it first, but also because I like how Roark was down-and-out in the eyes of his industry but he stayed true to himself. The world was against him. He was aware of that, but had no reason to care about the world’s opinion, so he didn’t.

I like AS because I could understand Dagny’s and Hank Rearden’s jobs. Keeping the trains running and making basic materials are some of the most tangible things. They’re not industries with personal preference. You can clearly measure how long a train takes and how often it’s on time. There are clear engineering figures of merit for materials. Architecture is the opposite. Most customers were buying architectural design services based on the newspaper, which was printing things based on what made money for Wynand. Roark existed outside this tail-chasing circle. His was the real art, but that’s hard for me to relate to because I’m not artistic. So I couldn’t relate to him destroying a building because someone tinkered with his design.

This is sort-of similar to how I like The Virtue of Selfishness but struggled with The Romanitc Manifesto. I came away from The Romantic Manifesto thinking she was saying sense of life was the random irrational motivations that hold sway in the absence of a philosophy. Then I realized philosophy underpins a sense of life. I still don’t get that book.

This is making me thing there are two side to the four Rand books I’ve read: the tangible and the artistic. I wonder if it was intentional that Rand wrote one work of fiction about something artistic and another about industries with objective figures of merit.