My border-crossing Amazon.com order of five weeks ago evidently gets lost in the mail and so they kindly send me a replacement order, expedited shipping, at no extra charge. (Actually they end up over-refunding me five dollars.) Among the books I’ve ordered is The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert. From Paul Auster’s introduction:

Neither a poet nor a novelist, neither a philosopher nor an essayist, Joubert was a man of letters without portfolio whose work consists of a vast series of notebooks in which he wrote down his thoughts every day for more than forty years … a writer who spent his whole life preparing himself for a work that never came to be written, a writer of the highest rank who paradoxically never produced a book. Joubert speaks in whispers, and one must draw very close to him to hear what he is saying.

The book opens with this notebook entry of Joubert’s, tentatively dated 1783:

The only way to have friends is to throw everything out the window, to keep your door unlocked, and never to know where you will be sleeping at night.