Talking about writing with Joubert

 Paul Auster translated a collection of items from Joubert’s notebooks, including this one about collections:

Collections, thoughts. The man shows himself in them, if the author does not.

 

Joubert was musing about his own mind. What did the topics that kept coming up in his notebooks say about himself? Auster, in choosing the items for his brief collection from 50 years of notebooks, considered a similar question. What does the collection say about the collector? And what about us, the readers who like Joubert? People who like Joubert like to think about the topics he considered, including writing.

Here are five notes on the topic, written by Joubert, chosen and translated by Auster, admired by me:

 

It is not my words that I polish, but my ideas.

 

Speak for the ear and write for the memory.

 

Everything that is exact is short.

 

A work of genius, whether poetic or didactic, is too long if it cannot be read in one day.

 

When you write easily, you always think you have more talent than you really do.

 

• The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, pp. 91, 102, 122, 99, 9, 101. For a note on Auster’s death, see “Paul Auster: 1947 — 2024,” May 2, 2024.