The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert

Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) wrote daily for over 40 years without producing a single book. This selection from his notebooks, edited and translated by Paul Auster, contains samples of his reflections on writing, judgments of his contemporaries, pronouncements against scientific materialism, parenting tips, aesthetic musings, comments on the Revolution and its aftermath, and cosmic miniatures. Not published in their entirety until 1938, the notebooks reveal Joubert as an author of great clarity and depth, perhaps France’s first truly modern writer. Samples from the Notebooks: My lynx eyes.. I feel the almond in the shell, the water in the earth, the fire in the stone; A thought is a thing as real as a cannonball; And the most terrible, the most horrible of catastrophes imaginable, the conflagration of the universe, can it be anything more than the crackling, the burst, and the evaporation of a grain of powder on a candle? The great inconvenience of new books is that they prevent us from reading old books; The globe is a drop of water; the world is a drop of air. Marble is thickened air.