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More oxford books @ www.OxfordeBook.comFore more urdu books visit www.4Urdu.com292ESSAY ON SOURCESHarriman, defends his practice of eliminating Rand’s words and inserting his own asnecessary for greater clarity. In many cases, however, his editing serves to significantlyalter Rand’s meaning.Many of the edits involve small words that carry great weight, such as “if” and “but.”Sentences that Rand starts with the tentative “if” are rewritten to sound stronger andmore definite. Separate sentences are joined with “but.” Changes are sometimes made forwhat seem to be unarticulated aesthetic preferences, such as replacing Rand’s “heatedover”with “warmed-over.” 4 Rand’s original wording here is significant, for it providesevidence of her lingering difficulty with idiomatic and vernacular English. These roughpatches have been edited out of her fiction and published writing but remain in herprivate notes as a valuable testimony to her origins and linguistic development.The editing also obscures important shifts and changes in Rand’s thought. Early inher career Rand idolized the architect Frank Lloyd Wright, whom she used as inspirationfor Howard Roark. Even in this early phase of infatuation, however, there wereseeds of Rand’s later disillusionment with Wright’s “mysticism.” Reading his bookThe Disappearing City she noted to herself, “More of Wright’s ideas. Some beautiful,a great many too many not clear.” That hint of disappointment is muted in the publishedjournals, which render Rand’s sentiments more positively as “Some beautiful,a great many not clear.” 5 Gone too is the Nietzschean-style repetition of “many toomany,” which marks Rand’s continued attraction to the German philosopher.Even more alarming are the sentences and proper names present in Rand’s originalsthat have vanished entirely, without any ellipses or brackets to indicate a change. Whilearguing in her notebooks against a specific point of view, Rand would often attack byname an exponent of that view. For example, she mentions two libertarians, Albert JayNock and James Ingebretsen, while disagreeing with ideas she attributes to them. Theerasure of these names from the published diary changes the nature of Rand’s intellectualwork, making her ideas entirely self-referential instead of a response to the largersocial and political world in which she operated. 6Other omissions serve to decontextualize Rand entirely. Gone is a pessimistic musingabout the degeneration of the white race, as well as casual slang like “nance” (homosexual).7 It is not surprising that Rand’s diaries reflected the prejudices and prevailing ideasof her time; indeed, it would be more surprising had she remained unaffected.Considered individually, many of the changes to Rand’s diaries are minor, but taken asa whole they add up to a different Rand. In her original notebooks she is more tentative,historically bounded, and contradictory. The edited diaries have transformed her privatespace, the hidden realm in which she did her thinking, reaching, and groping, replacing itwith a slick manufactured world in which all of her ideas are definite, well formulated, andclear. Even her outlines for her major novels have been rewritten, with different drafts collapsedinto one another. Given Rand’s titanic clashes with editors who sought to modifyher work, it is not hard to guess what her reaction would be to these changes.The Journals of Ayn Rand are thus best understood as an interpretation of Rand ratherthan her own writing. Scholars must use these materials with extreme caution. Theyserve as a useful introduction to Rand’s development and a guide to the available archivalmaterial, but they should not be accepted at face value. Accordingly, I quote from the