 I'm currently reading the fountain and I noticed that Dominique in the beginning was nihilistic and aimless. But when she met Rourke, she seemed to find meaning in life. Why do you think that is? I mean, Dominique is a particular type of character. I mean, I think Eyn Rand said Dominique is her Eyn Rand in a bad mood, right? Dominique is a real value. She's not a nihilist at all. She's not a nihilist at all. She's a real value. She appreciates beauty. She appreciates achievement. She appreciates greatness. She admires it deeply. It evokes profound emotion in her. But she also believes we live in a world that doesn't deserve the achievement, the beauty and the greatness. See even though she might feel this way, she believes she lives in a world in which other people don't deserve to be exposed to this greatness. So she is going to destroy it because they will destroy it. She would rather be the destroyer rather than them because they are not worthy. The rest of the world other than her. And when she meets Rourke, she discovers initially another example of greatness. And then as that, and I don't know how much to say because you're just reading the fountain head, but at the core she discovers that she doesn't have to care about what other people think. She doesn't have to care and she shouldn't care about the culture's attitude towards greatness. That's what fundamentally Rourke shows her and teaches her. Not by lecturing to her, but by living again, by living a life that projects not caring about the judgment of the world, but caring only about his own judgment, caring about only about the achievement, the beautiful, the success. He teaches that the greatness is achievable, sustainable, winnable, and that what the rest of the world thinks doesn't matter. And it takes a whole novel for her to learn that and you'll see. And it's in every dimension, every dimension from art to architecture to character to sex. Every dimension is covered her attitude, but I wouldn't call her a nihilist. She is destroying, but she's not destroying for the sake of destruction. She's destroying so that the people unworthy of the greatness won't get to destroy it themselves. So she will beat them to it. She will take it out of their grasp and she will destroy it in her way. Not in their pathetic mediocrity. I mean, what does, what does Tui want? He wants a world of mediocracies. He wants a world with no achievement, a world with no success. What she's trying to do is save the world from Tui by destroying great achievement, by taking it out of his realm. She learns that that's the wrong approach. And Rourke teaches of that, Rourke teaches that by just being Rourke, by being this great sold man. If you haven't read The Found Head, in many respects, it's, you know, it's her best book. I mean, my favorite book is Apple Shod, but in many respects I understand why. For many, many people, their favorite book is The Fountain Hood. The way that she thinks about ethics or morality and what the subject is. And in a sense, you could say what its basic question is. So this is part way through art and moral treason. And she's talking about a person's, the development of a moral sense of life, which is connected to a development of understanding morality. And she writes, and that in today's culture, this is rarely aided. That is, for a person who is on a path to trying to develop a moral sense of life and a real firsthand grasp of morality. She's rarely helped in regard to that and usually hindered. A paragraph and a half. But the development of a child's normative abstractions is not merely left unaided. It is all but stifled and destroyed. The child whose value and capacity survives the moral barbarism of his upbringing has to find his own way to preserve and develop his sense of values. Apart from its many other evils, conventional morality is not concerned with the formation of a child's character. It does not teach or show him what kind of man he ought to be and why. And what kind of man he ought to be is all italicized and why. It is concerned only with imposing a set of rules upon him. Concrete, arbitrary, contradictory, and more often than not incomprehensible rules, which are mainly prohibitions and duties. A child whose only notion of morality, i.e. of values, consists of such matters as, wash your ears, don't be rude to Aunt Rosalie, do your homework, help Papa to mow the lawn, or Mama to wash the dishes. Faces the alternative of either a passively amoral resignation leading to a future of hopeless cynicism or a blind rebellion. Observe that the more intelligent and independent a child, the more unruly he is in regard to such commands. And I'll stop there. So two things, I mean, I highlighted one, which she highlights, as I said, she puts it in italics, what kind of man he ought to be. And the sentence before that, the formation of a child's character, that's the subject of morality for Iron Man. It is about the development of your character or of identifying and then moving towards the kind of man you think you ought to be or the kind of individual that you think you ought to be. But the goal is a total and a sum. It's, this is what I want to be, not a sum discrete choice. There's a trolley going 60 miles an hour and it's going to run into five people and do you throw the lever or not? And that's what morality is about. That is such a derivative, to the extent that it is a moral issue, it is such a derivative issue from Iron Man's perspective. And I think from her thinking about what is morality, it is about you can lead different kinds of lives. What life are you going to lead and what? And that's an abstract perspective. And part of what she's stressing in art and moral treason is there's a development to gain this abstract perspective on yourself and yourself in the world. And that a child is trying to get to this level of abstraction, particularly a child who starts to be concerned with this kind of issue. But it's the norm, not the exception, I think, that when you ask a young child, what do you want to be in life? And it's, I want to be a policeman or I want to be a fireman or I want to be some other, I mean, it might be, as Iron Man brings up, a comic book figure that he admires or something like that. It's, this is what I want to be and this is the person that I want to be. Not, this is the choice that I hope I make when a trolley is rolling down the trains. And what really forming the issues, questions and sort of abstract perspective that morality is about is learning to see and to isolate that there are different kinds of lives. And your choice in life really is, which of these are you going to lead? And so to think of this as a specification of her perspective on philosophy, it's an aspect of her view, I think, that what philosophy is, is a set of ideas that have an integration and there are wide abstract ideas that frame life, including the thinking about life and the reality that I'm in and how do I cope with it? But there's a kind of interconnectedness to this. Even for the person who's not philosophical and I think I brought up her, the metaphor she uses of a kind of mongrel philosophy, that there's some kind of threads and interconnections, even though it's certainly not consistent threads and interconnections and there can be conflicts among the total. And the perspective on morality is particularly in regard to a person's character and putting it in the philosophy who needs it terms, the what should I do? But part of the what should I do is, and the crucial part is what should I become? And that's the issue of character and of the issue of premises and how premises shape a whole perspective on life.