A Blade of Grass to the Drowning Ant

Imagine a man who sits at his desk, day after day for some 50 years, and fills one notebook after another with jottings on every imaginable subject. Sometimes these are haphazard comments on passing fashions, but more often, and especially as he persists, his reflections take on depth and subtlety. He observes the landscape, and natural phenomena, with increasing keenness; he ponders historical and political events; he meditates on language and on style; he perceives unexpected nuances in his friendships, his relations with women, his standing among rivals and colleagues. These observations lead him to broader insights, many of which take the form of aphorisms. In an aphorism the experience of a lifetime can be distilled into one glittering, and sometimes, lethal formulation. Still other observations nag at him, and he returns to them, worrying them over, refining and polishing his daily entries over decades.In one sense he doesn’t know what he’s doing; is he writing a book, keeping a journal, scribbling for its own sake? In another sense, however, he enjoys a supreme, if secret, confidence: Bit by bit he is assembling a huge but hidden world parallel to that quotidian world in which he lives and works, suffers and delights. He knows, too – and it is per haps the source of his self-assurance – that whatever his book proves to be, he will never publish it. For one thing, his assembled apercus belong to no known genre; they are as varied and teeming as life itself; for another, they have an unruly shapelessness to which only death can add the conclusion. If he were to go on living for 100 or 200 hundred years, his notebooks too would continue to grow, like some obsessive crystal forever branching out into new configurations.Such is the case of the eccentric genius Joseph Joubert (1754-1824) whose “Carnets,” or “Notebooks,” constitute one of the lesser-known glories of French literature. At his death Joubert left behind some 205 of these notebooks, which he had begun to fill in 1774 but never sought to publish, despite the urgings of such friends as Chateaubriand (who went on to bring out an admiring selection in 1838). Joubert is usually classified as an aphorist in the great cynical French tradition of La Rochefoucauld and Vauvenargues, whom he rivals in wit and perspicacity though he eschews their malice. W.H. Auden included a dozen of Joubert’s aphorisms in “The Viking Book of Aphorisms” of 1962 (out of print but easily available through Amazon.com), of which my favorite is “A fluent writer always seems more talented than he is. To write well, one needs a natural facility and an acquired difficulty.” But in the end, Joubert is unclassifiable; his masterpiece is at once a single life, scrupulously observed, and a world, swarming with particulars but governed by certain unvarying principles.Fortunately for American readers, a selection is again available in the superb NYRB Classics series under the title “The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert” (159 pages, $14.95), edited and translated by the novelist Paul Auster. Mr. Auster’s selection originally appeared in 1983 but received little notice. His translations are quite elegant and he provides a perceptive introduction. Yet I cannot help wishing that Mr. Auster had used the opportunity of the publication to expand his selection, which is misleadingly skimpy. In his own way, Joubert was a voluminous author; the most recent French edition of the “Carnets” comprises almost 1,300 pages in two stout volumes. In addition, Mr. Auster has a predilection for the fragmentary, the incomplete, the broken utterance; to include a phrase such as Joubert’s remark of 1803, “but in the end a year comes when you find that you are getting old,” or his dictim of 1802, “to call everything by its name,” is to make him seem uncharacteristically banal.Mr. Auster had not merely an “acquired difficulty” in making his selection but an “acquired impossibility.” He does best, I think, when he catches that inimitable blend of delicacy and rigor that characterizes Joubert at his best, and which links him to such earlier masters as La Fontaine (whom Joubert quite rightly dubbed the “French Homer”). There is a precision of tenderness, perhaps unique to Joubert, in such entries as this of 1785: “I imitate the dove, and often I throw a blade of grass to the drowning ant.”Unlike his aphoristic predecessors, Joubert possessed a sense of mystery. Mr. Auster does full justice to this side of his mercurial personality. A note from 1786 reads simply, “if there is one sad thing in the world, it is the poplar on the mountains.” I have no idea what this means and yet it touches me; it’s hardly a perception, almost the shadow of a perception, fragile and indelible at once. Like Lichtenberg, another secretive scribbler, Joubert often mingles mundane insights with apocalyptic shivers. An entry from 1784 reads, “If the earth must perish, then astronomy is our only consolation.” And 37 years later he would remark, “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?”Joubert flourished in his chosen obscurity, but at the same time he situated himself with considerable shrewdness in the French literary tradition. Of Voltaire he remarked that he “had the soul of a monkey and the mind of an angel,” and it is a judgment made by someone who saw himself as an equal. There are writers whose subterranean influence is all the stronger for being hidden. Though Joubert was recognized by Chateaubriand and later, by Sainte-Beuve, Matthew Arnold (who compared him to Coleridge), and the owlish and enigmatic Maurice Blanchot, his pervasive effect on later writers is evident in almost indiscernible undertones.Paul Valery, who devoted the early mornings of a long life to his own monumental “Notebooks,” is an obvious example, as is Proust, but the Joubertian voice echoes also in other, less expected contexts. Throughout the work of Philippe Jaccottet, easily France’s greatest living poet, Joubert’s questing and restless accents continue to infiltrate, though magically transmuted. Both writers have the rare gift of vanishing into their words. And one of Jaccottet’s most resonant lines might stand as a secret epitaph for his halfhidden predecessor: “Let effacement be my way of shining forth.”eormsby@nysun.com

A Blade of Grass to the Drowning Ant

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