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More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.comFore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.comA ROUND UNIVERSE 147exceptional young man with a profound intelligence. Barbara admiredNathan and shared his values. According to Rand, they had all the necessaryingredients for a successful relationship. Against her instinctsBarbara followed Rand’s advice. Nathan and Barbara’s subsequent decisionto change their last name to Branden symbolized the new strengthof Rand’s growing circle. “Branden” had the crisp, Aryan ring of charactersin Rand’s fiction; it also incorporated Rand’s chosen surname. 35 Asin the case of young Alisa, the symbolism was clear enough. Barbara andNathan were reborn not only as a married couple, but as a couple withan explicit allegiance to Rand.After their marriage the Brandens and the Collective formed thenucleus of Rand’s social life to the exclusion of all others. Rand sequesteredherself during the day, laboring on Atlas Shrugged. At night sheemerged for conversation, mostly about the book. Saturday nights werethe highlight; no matter how intense her writing, Rand never canceledtheir salon. The Collective gathered at Rand’s Thirty-sixth Street apartment,a small, dimly lit space “reeking with smoke” and filled with hairfrom the O’Connors’ Persian cats. 36 The apartment could not comparewith the magnificent estate at Chatsworth, but Rand loved that she couldsee the Empire State Building from a window in her office. Modernistfurniture in her favorite color, blue-green, filled the apartment, andashtrays were available at every turn. When Rand finished a chapter, itwas a reading night, with the Collective silently devouring the pages shedrafted. Other nights were dedicated to philosophical discussion.During these evenings Rand taught the Collective the essentials of herphilosophy. No longer content to celebrate individualism through herfiction, she now understood, “my most important job is the formulationof a rational morality of and for man, of and for his life, of and for thisearth.” 37 Objectivism, as she would soon be calling her ideas, was an ingenioussynthesis of her ethical selfishness and the Aristotelian rationalitythat had captured her interest after she completed The Fountainhead.Stitching the two together, Rand argued that she had rationally provedthe validity of her moral system. Unlike other systems, she claimed,Objectivist morality was not based on theological assumptions, but ona logically demonstrable understanding of what man’s needs on earthwere. In essence, Objectivism was Rand’s rebuttal of the skeptical andrelativistic orientation that had characterized American intellectual life