Collected Prose

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 Joubert 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 Saint-Beuve and Matthew Arnold, who compared Joubert favorably to Coleridge and remarked that “they both had from nature an ardent impulse for seeking the genuine 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 900 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—nor 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, has 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 descretion and honesty, with his plain-spoken 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 rhetorical drums, and he isn’t out to shock anyone with his ideas. Those of us who love his work guard him as a treasured 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 800 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.