Howard Roark is the central character in Ayn Rand's 1943 novel, "the Fountainhead". He was an architect in New York in the 1930s. He was in love with architecture. It was the one thing he cared about the most. In the novel he declares that it is "your work, the material the earth offers you and what you make of it" that embodies the meaning of life.
This assertion is reminiscent of the conception of individual value during the Renaissance. At that time, people were paying more attention on the transient nature of human life than ever before. In the Renaissance view, the only way for a man to achieve any sort of immortality, to have any meaningful value after his short life, was through producing excellent work that would endure for a long period of time, therefore transcending his own death. In this sense, Howard Roark's notion of the meaning of life tallies with that of a Renaissance man.
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