Finding a place, being content

 I think a sense of place is linked to a sense of contentment.

It’s an ancient idea. Here’s Joseph Joubert taking a stab at that connection:

 

To be in one’s place, to be at one’s post, to be part of the order, to be content. Not to murmur of suffering, to be incapable of being unhappy.

 

I’m interested in place, but I came to this passage in a meandering way. The translator is Paul Auster. I’ve been thinking of Auster because the book reviewers have been tempting me with Siri Hustvedt’s Ghost Stories, a “meditation on grief, memory, and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, Paul Auster.”

• Source: The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, translated with an introduction by Paul Aster; New York: New York Review of Books, 2005, p. 41.