Some writers live and die in the shadows, and they don’t begin to live for us until after they are dead. Emily Dickinson published just three poems during her lifetime; Gerard Manley Hopkins published only one. Kafka kept his unfinished novels to himself, and if not for a promise broken by his friend Max Brod, they would have been burned. Christopher Smart’s Bedlamite rant, Jubilate Agno, was composed in the early 1760s but didn’t find its way into print until 1939. Think of how many writers disappeared when the Library of Alexandria burned in 391 A.D. Think of how many books were destroyed by the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. For every miraculous resurrection, for every work saved from oblivion by freethinkers like Petrarch and Boccaccio, one could enumerate hundreds of losses. Ralph Ellison worked for years on a follow-up novel to Invisible Man, then the manuscript burned up in a fire. In a fit of madness, Gogol destroyed the second part of Dead Souls. What we know of the work of Heraclitus and Sappho exists only in fragments. In his later years, Herman Melville was so thoroughly forgotten that most people thought he was long dead when his obituary appeared in 1891. It wasn’t until Moby-Dick was discovered in a secondhand bookshop in 1920 that Melville came to be recognized as one of our essential novelists.
The afterlife of writers is precarious at best, and for those who fail to publish before they die—by choice, by happenstance, by sheer bad luck—the fate of their work is almost certain doom. The American poet Charles Reznikoff reported that his grandmother threw out every one of his grandfather’s poems after he died—an entire life’s work discarded with the trash. More recently, the young John Kennedy O’Toole committed suicide over his failure to find a publisher for his book. When the novel finally appeared, it was a critical success. Who knows how many unread masterpieces are hidden away in attics or moldering in cellars? Without someone to defend a dead writer’s work, that work could just as well never have been written. Think of Osip Mandelstam, murdered by Stalin in 1938. If his widow, Nadezhda Mandelstam, had not committed the entire body of his work to memory, he would have been lost to us as a poet.
There are dozens of posthumous writers in the history of literature, but no case is stranger or more obscure than that of Joseph Joubert, a Frenchman who wrote in the last quarter of the eighteenth century and the first quarter of the nineteenth. Not only did he not publish a single word while he was alive, but the work he left behind escapes clear definition, which means that he has continued to exist as an almost invisible writer even after his discovery, acquiring a handful of ardent readers in every generation, but never fully emerging from the shadows that surrounded him while he was alive. Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher nor an essayist, Joubert was a man of letters without portfolio whose work consists of a vast series of notebooks in which he wrote down his thoughts every day for more than forty years. All the entries are dated, but the notebooks cannot be construed as a traditional diary, since there are scarcely any personal remarks in it. Nor was Joubert a writer of maxims in the classical French manner. He was something far more oblique and challenging, a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that never came to be written, a writer of the highest rank who paradoxically never produced a book. Joubert speaks in whispers, and one must draw very close to him to hear what he is saying. He was born in Montignac (Dordogne) on May 7, 1754, the son of master surgeon Jean Joubert. The second of eight surviving children, Joubert completed his local education at the age of fourteen and was then sent to Toulouse to continue his studies. His father hoped that he would pursue a career in the law, but Joubert’s interests lay in philosophy and the classics. After graduation, he taught for several years in the school where he had been a student and then returned to Montignac for two years, without professional plans or any apparent ambitions, already suffering from the poor health that would plague him throughout his life.
In May 1778, just after his twenty-fourth birthday, Joubert moved to Paris, where he took up residence at the Hôtel de Bordeaux on the rue des Francs-Bourgeois. He soon became a member of Diderot’s circle, and through his association with Diderot was brought into contact with the sculptor Pigalle and many other artists of the period. During those early years in Paris he also met Fontanes, who would remain his closest friend for the rest of his life. Both Joubert and Fontanes frequented the literary salon of the countess Fanny de Beauharnais (whose niece later married Bonaparte). Other members included Buffon, La Harpe, and Restif de la Bretonne.
In 1785, Fontanes and Joubert attempted to found a newsletter about Paris literary life for English subscribers, but the venture failed. That same year, Joubert entered into a liaison with the wife of Restif de la Bretonne, Agnès Lebègue, a woman fourteen years his senior. But by March of 1786 the affair had ended—painfully for Joubert. Later that year, he made his first visit to the town of Villeneuve and met Victoire Moreau, who would become his wife in 1793. During this period Joubert read much and wrote little. He studied philosophy, music, and painting, but the various writing projects he began—an appreciation of Pigalle, an essay on the navigator Cook—were never completed. For the most part, it seems that Joubert watched the world around him, cultivated his friendships, and meditated. As time went on, he turned more and more to his notebooks as the place to develop his thoughts and explore his inner life. By the late 1780s and early 1790s, they had become a serious daily enterprise for him. At first, he looked upon his jottings as a way to prepare himself for a larger, more systematic work, a great book of philosophy that he dreamed he had it in him to write. As the years passed, however, and the project continued to elude him, he slowly came to realize that the notebooks were an end in themselves, eventually admitting that “these thoughts form not only the foundation of my work, but of my life.”
Joubert had long been a supporter of revolutionary views, and when the Revolution came in 1789, he welcomed it enthusiastically. In late 1790, he was named Justice of the Peace in Montignac, a position that entailed great responsibilities and made him the leading citizen of the town. By all accounts, he fulfilled his tasks with vigilance and fairness and was widely respected for his work. But he soon became disillusioned with the increasingly violent nature of the Revolution. He declined to stand for reelection in 1792 and gradually withdrew from politics.
After his marriage in 1793, he retired to Villeneuve, from then on dividing his time between the country and Paris. Fontanes had gone into exile in London, where he met Chateaubriand. Eventually, upon their return to Paris, Joubert and the two younger men collaborated on the magazine Mercure de France. Joubert would later help Chateaubriand with many passages of Le Génie du christianisme and give him financial help in times of trouble. During the early years of the nineteenth century, Joubert was surrounded by many of the most successful men and women in France, deeply admired for his lucid ideas, his sharp critical intelligence, and his enormous talent for friendship.
When he died in 1824 at the age of seventy, Chateaubriand, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, eulogized him in the Journal des débats: “He was one of those men you loved for the delicacy of his feelings, the goodness of his soul, the evenness of his temper, the uniqueness of his character, the keenness and brilliance of his mind—a mind that was interested in everything and understood everything. No one has ever forgotten himself so thoroughly and been so concerned with the welfare of others.”
Although Fontanes and Chateaubriand had both urged him to put together a book from his daily writings, Joubert resisted the temptation to publish. The first selection to appear in print, entitled Pensées, was compiled by Chateaubriand in 1838 and distributed privately among Joubert’s friends. Other editions followed, eliciting sympathetic and passionate essays by such diverse figures as Sainte-Beuve and Matthew Arnold, who compared Joubert favorably to Coleridge and remarked that “they both had favorably an ardent impulse for seeking the genuine from nature an art they thought about, and an organ for truth on all matters they thought about, and an organ for finding it and recognising it when it was found.” Those early editions all divided Joubert’s writings into chapters with abstract headings such as “Truth,” “Literature,” “Family,” “Society,” and so on. It wasn’t until 1938, in a two-volume work prepared by André Beaunier for Gallimard, that Joubert’s writings were presented in the original order of their composition. I have drawn my selections for this book from the nine hundred tightly printed pages of Beaunier’s scrupulous edition.
No more than a tenth of Joubert’s work is included here. In choosing the entries, I have been guided above all by my own contemporary and idiosyncratic tastes, concentrating my attention on Joubert’s aesthetic theories, his “imaginary physics,” and passages of direct autobiographical significance. I have not included the lengthy reading notes that Joubert made during his study of various philosophers—Malebranche, Kant, Locke, and others—or the frequent references to writers of his time, most of whom are unknown to us today. For convenience and economy, I have eliminated the dates that precede each entry.
I first discovered Joubert’s work in 1971, through an essay written by Maurice Blanchot, “Joubert et L’espace.” In it, Blanchot compares Joubert to Mallarmé and makes a solid case for considering him to be the most modern writer of his period, the one who speaks most directly to us now. And indeed, the free-floating, questing nature of Joubert’s mind along with his concise and elegant style have not grown old with the passage of time. Everything is mixed together in the notebooks, and reflections on literature and philosophy are scattered among observations about the weather, the landscape, and politics. Entries of unforgettable psychological insight (“Those who never back down love themselves more than they love the truth”) alternate with brief, chilling comments on the turmoil around him (“Stacking the dead on top of one another”), which in turn are punctuated by sudden outbursts of levity (“They say that souls have no sex; of course they do”). The more you read Joubert, the more you want to go on reading him. He draws you in with his discretion and honesty, with his plainspoken brilliance, with his quiet but utterly original way of looking at the world.
At the same time, it is easy to ignore Joubert. He doesn’t point to himself or bang on loud ideas. Those of us who love him know him more as a treasure secret, but in the 164 years since his writings were first made available to the public, he has scarcely caused a ripple in the world at large. This translation was first published by Jack Shoemaker of North Point Press in 1983, and the book failed to arouse anything but indifference on the part of American critics and readers. The book received just one review (in The Boston Globe), and sales amounted to something in the neighborhood of eight hundred copies. On the other hand, not long after the book was published, Joubert’s relevance was brought home to me in a remarkable way. I gave a copy to one of my oldest friends, the painter David Reed. David had a friend who had recently landed in Bellevue after suffering a nervous breakdown, and when David went to visit him in the hospital, he left behind his copy of Joubert—on loan. Two or three weeks later, when the friend was finally released, he called David to apologize for not returning the book. After he had read it, he said, he had given it to another patient. That patient had passed it on to yet another patient, and little by little Joubert had made his way around the ward. Interest in the book became so keen that groups of patients would gather in the dayroom to read passages out loud to one another and discuss them. When David’s friend asked for the book back, he was told that it no longer belonged to him. “It’s our book,” one of the patients said. “We need it.” As far as I’m concerned, that is the most eloquent literary criticism I have ever heard, proof that the right book in the right place is medicine for the human soul. As Joubert himself once put it in 1801: “A thought is a thing as real as a cannon ball.”
P. A. August 11, 2002
Introduction to The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert
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Amid the recent tributes to Paul Auster, who died on April 30, 2024, at age seventy-seven, one important work of his that was overlooked was his translation in the early 1980s of The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. Joubert was a French writer from the late 1700s and early 1800s, a man of both the Enlightenment and the Romantic age. You may not have heard of Joubert before—he never actually published in his lifetime, and he’s not famous for his maxims like Pascal or La Rochefoucauld—though you may have encountered his saying “To teach is to learn twice.” Joseph Joubert is, however, an original thinker, a writer of piercing aphorisms of surprising modernity and warm humanity who is well worth reading and rereading. He was a friend of Diderot and Chateaubriand among others, and he saw both the aristocracy and the common folk up close, before and after the French Revolution. (...)
In his meditations on the natural realm, there is a spiritual quality that is reverent toward life and creation. His musings on eternity and dimensionality would sound familiar to readers of Gurdjieff and Ouspensky. Joubert’s interest in the physical world, his sensitivity to the divine that is in nature, might have made him of interest to American Transcendentalists, and indeed it was a publisher in Boston that printed the first American translation of Joubert’s Thoughts (1867).
His perceptions are like flashes of light. “Where do thoughts go? Into the memory of God,” and “The breath of the mind is attention.” One of the most intriguing, and hopeful, is from 1798:
Nothing in the moral world is lost, just as nothing in the material world is annihilated. All our feelings and thoughts on this earth are only the beginnings of feelings and thoughts that will be completed elsewhere.
Less cynical than La Rochefoucauld and more universal (less religious) than Pascal, as a moralist Joubert is more than tolerant; he is merciful (“Sincere and simple minds can never be more than half mistaken”). In his cultural history From Dawn to Decadence (2000), Jacques Barzun describes Joubert as “one of the most sought-after conversationalists of the ensuing two decades [after the Terror]. . . . His epigrams do not attack but explain and advise.” One of the thoughts Barzun quotes is “If you want to be heard by the public, which is deaf, speak in a lower voice.” Again, as Auster observed, “Joubert speaks in whispers.” (...)
The first American edition was Some of the “Thoughts” of Joseph Joubert (Boston, 1867) translated by George H. Calvert, and a British translation by Henry Attwell was published in the 1890s. The aforementioned biography by the British historian Joan Evans, The Unselfish Egoist: A Study of Joseph Joubert, was published in 1947, and in 1992 Oxford University Press published the Scottish scholar David P. Kinloch’s The Thought and Art of Joseph Joubert, 1754–1824.
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