The Journals of Ayn Rand Read Free

such negligible, incidental matters as earning a living...” (July 30, 1945).
    Too many of AR’s professed admirers in print are academics of the scholastic persuasion. The Journals gives us the original, a purely Objectivist mind at work—mostly right, sometimes wrong, but always, from start to finish, reality-oriented.
    In terms of cognitive value to the reader, the new material alone in this volume warrants the price. It is new to me also. No matter how clear Objectivism is in my mind, every time I read another Ayn Rand book, it becomes clearer. This book is no exception.
    David Harriman has done an excellent editorial job. He has brought order to dozens of large cardboard cartons filled with scattered papers and mementos. He has selected the best of the notes, organized them chronologically, offered explanations when these were available and helpful, and edited the wording, especially for grammar, of the early pages, when AR had not yet fully grasped English. For all this work, I am grateful to David Harriman, as all fans of AR should be.
    The final chapter of the Journals shows us AR near the end of her life. There is nothing to publish in regard to her work on mathematics or neurology, but some of her notes on psycho-epistemology have been included—along with every word she wrote for her last projected novel.
    To Lorne Dieterling was to be “the story of a woman [a dancer] who is totally motivated by love for values—and how one maintains such a state when alone in an enemy world.” (This formulation is from November 1957, a month after Atlas Shrugged was published.) The two basic “sense of life” music numbers to be danced by the heroine in the novel are the Overture to La Traviata and “Will O’ the Wisp,” one of AR’s favorite “tiddly wink” pieces.
    Verdi’s La Traviata Overture, she writes, is to be “the dance of rising, without ever moving from one spot—done by means of her arms and body—ending on ‘Dominique’s statue’ posture, as ’higher than raised arms,‘ as the achieved, as the total surrender to a vision and, simultaneously, ’This is I.‘ (The open, the naked, the ’without armor.‘)” As to “Will O’ the Wisp,” it represents “the triumph—the tap dance and ballet combined— my total sense of life.... (Probably danced in a low-grade dive, with Lome [the hero] present....”
    Such was the sense of life not only of a young immigrant in her twenties ho was brimming over with new ideas, but also of a philosopher in her sev enties, who had lived consistently by every one of her ideas. Such was the sense of life of an artist “alone in an enemy world,” who had already endured her greatest disappointments—and created her greatest achievements.
    As David Harriman puts it in his eloquent conclusion:
    “Ayn Rand has come full circle. She returned at the end to [the] problem [of irrational people] that had concerned her from the beginning.... At this stage, however, she knows the solution ...
    “It is fitting, therefore, that her last fiction notes are about a woman like herself, who maintains such a [joyous and lighthearted] view of life to the end, even while those around her do not.”
    She did it—how? In essence, by means of these Journals (and their equivalents through the decades). In other words, she did it in part through the knowledge she methodically struggled to gain, but above all through the intransigent will at the root of such a struggle: the will to think, in every issue and all her life long.
    Whoever cares to match the price can reach the same result. As the first payment—I say this to those with their lives still ahead of them—I suggest that you read this book.
    Leonard Peikoff
Irvine, California
October 1996

EDITOR’S PREfACE
    In a note to herself at the age of twenty-three, AR wrote: “From now on—no thought whatever about yourself, only about your work. You are only a writing engine. Don’t stop, until you really and honestly know