Joseph Joubert: The Cursed Desire

I came to Joseph Joubert fairly recently, the kind of encounter that makes you wonder immediately why it took so long. He is not a companion of decades. What he brought is still warm from the finding, and I want to set it down before it settles into anything more familiar.

He was born in 1754 in Montignac, in the Périgord, and his health failed him early: he gave up teaching at twenty-two and spent two years in solitary study before going to Paris in 1778, where he met Diderot and D’Alembert and formed a friendship with Fontanes that would shape the rest of his life more than any book he might have written. He married in 1793 and settled between Paris and Villeneuve-sur-Yonne, where Fontanes, and later the young Chateaubriand, were frequent visitors. In 1809 Fontanes, by then Grand Master of the university, appointed him an inspector general of the imperial university system. For over forty years, in notebooks shown only to his closest circle, he set down what he thought and published not a single line of it while he lived.

The easy reading of such a life is loss: a great writer withheld from the world by illness, timidity, some failure of nerve. I no longer believe that reading. For most writers the notebook is a quarry, raw material waiting for a finished thing to be cut from it. For Joubert, the notebook was the finished thing, made in a form built never to close. He said as much of himself, plainly: “Happy is the man who can do only one thing; in doing it, he fulfills his destiny.” Everything else in the notebooks follows from taking that sentence seriously. “How it happens that in searching for words we come to ideas,” he wrote. Language, for him, held thoughts the mind had not yet reached on its own, and writing was the instrument that reached them. Writing is closer to thinking than to speaking, he set down in one of his earliest surviving entries, dated 1791, and the claim only sounds modest until you notice what it does to the ordinary hierarchy: speech, not the page, turns out to be the lesser act.

That same instinct explains the form he chose, if chose is even the right verb for something closer to a compulsion. “What is isolated can be seen better,” he wrote of the maxim, and applied the principle to his own life’s work more thoroughly than to any single sentence: forty years of entries that refuse to build toward one another, each one asking to be read alone and complete. Maurice Blanchot, in the essay through which Paul Auster would later discover Joubert, described this as a matter of space: Joubert wanted room enough to hold a thought whole, free of the forward pull an ordinary sentence puts on anything it carries. “In a certain way he thinks of everything all at once,” Blanchot wrote. Joubert confessed to the same ambition himself, in 1815, admitting to a desire he called cursed: to fit “a whole book into a page, a whole page into a phrase,” and that phrase, in turn, into a single word.

There is something close to prayer in how far this compression goes. “Where do ideas go? They go into the memory of God,” he wrote, without apparent embarrassment at the size of the claim. Elsewhere: “When one enters oneself, one sees God.” They read like field notes taken by someone already inside the experience, reporting back on what the interior actually contains. His sense of truth works the same way: “What is true by lamplight is not always true by sunshine.” A remark about writing at night opens, almost without warning, onto something larger: how much truth depends on the light we meet it in.

None of this reached anyone by Joubert’s own effort. His widow gave the notebooks to Chateaubriand, who edited a private selection from the loose pages in 1838, fourteen years after Joubert’s death, and who once called his tranquility-seeking friend “an egoist who occupied himself only with others.” Sainte-Beuve wrote of him next, in France; Matthew Arnold, reading Sainte-Beuve, wrote his own tribute and set Joubert beside Coleridge for an extraordinary fineness in the perception of truth. Most twentieth-century English readers found him only through the selection Paul Auster translated in 1983, working from Blanchot’s essay, which Auster had discovered a decade earlier and which his neighbor and fellow writer, Lydia Davis, translated for its afterword. Joubert seems always to have traveled this way: from one devoted reader to another.

He was frail and reticent, married to a woman who had to screen his visitors for him. The accounts left by those who knew him are unusually affectionate, warmer than the notebooks alone would lead you to expect.

I keep returning to one line, plain enough to seem almost out of place beside the rest: “A thought is a thing as real as a cannonball.” He spent forty years trying to fit a book into a page, a page into a phrase, a phrase into a single word. Here is the cursed desire fulfilled: a thought landing whole, already carrying the weight of the thing it names.

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