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November 9.
Shadows on the wall: judgments, conjectures.
Everything is double and composed of soul and body. The universe is the body of God (but here the body is within the soul). Spirit has matter for its body. There is the body of the body. The rare has the dense for its body, and the hard is the body of the dense. Always and to infinity, the thick and the thin hold together through the inside and the outside. Everything is made of more and less. No body without soul, nor soul without body. If there is the body of the body, perhaps there is also the soul of the soul.
Note. How it is by searching for words that one reaches as far as ideas. Words are the bodies of thoughts.
Of stanzas, — or divisions, — or pause, — or compartments. That every work of the mind, if well made, is thus distributed. But few works can bear very marked symmetries.
November 12.
(For the child.)
Does he speak? — No, he does not speak to us, but he hears us. — Did he make this tree? — No, but he made the first tree, from which all the others came.
There is a great book in heaven. Everything one says, what one does, what one thinks is written there. — In what language? — God knows, but we know nothing of it. Yes, what we are saying at this hour, what we shall say today, and everything we may say as long as our life lasts.
Can one see him? — One can see him with the mind. — Why not otherwise? — Because our eyes prevent us. God is not a body as we are: that is why one cannot see him when one has a body. He has given us his idea... We shall know it when we are in heaven... A child cannot know what a man knows, nor a man all that an angel knows, nor an angel all that God knows.
Tuesday, November 13.
Religion. Of too much. — Enough, contained within too much: it is its marrow, it is its juice. It is the almond in its husks, the stone in the flesh of the fruit, the flesh of the fruit in the peel, the chestnut in its bush, in its thistle, in its hedgehog case, its porcupine case.
Sometimes, for use, it is too much that is essential. Thus the flesh of the pear is worth more to us than its seeds, although for its reproduction, which is nature’s great goal, the seed is the necessary, the enough, and the flesh is the superfluous, the too much.
November 19.
Aristotle, in his Metaphysics (Book 4, chap. 2, page 63, Geneva edition. Stoër 1608 in 6 vols., vol. III), says (approximately): The sophist is content with appearances, the dialectician with proof; the philosopher wishes to know by inspection, by self-evidence. — Their assertions and their opinions are at issue. The dialectician, indeed, has no need to see: it is enough that it be proved to him, according to rule, with form or without form.
Style is thought itself.
November 22.
Women whose defects are a natural indigence powerfully awaken love, which is a kind of help. “He is the son of poverty,” Plato said. I have never understood what he meant. But certainly he said something very true and very beautiful in more than one sense. Love is great, it is extreme, only when it is really a kind of assistance and generosity.
Love. Plato probably meant that he was the son of our own poverty and of that indigence of our nature which allows no one to find his enough (what he loves) in himself.
Bonaparte and his speech.
Appearance of a landscape in weather free of mist. Lines, points, and angles stand out from the background of the scene, offering the mind the framework of what stretches before it. It is the object itself hollowed out. It is a picture in abridgment. The mind adopts and retains it; it keeps it and reproduces it when necessary, when it pleases.
November 23.
That public morals are a path which newcomers find cleared in the course of life; that where there are no morals there is no path; that each is obliged to make one for himself he loses himself searching for his route (he loses his time going astray).
How, when languages are formed, the very ease of expressing oneself harms the mind, because no obstacle stops it, contains it, makes it circumspect, or forces it to choose among its thoughts, a choice to which it is forced in languages still new by the delay imposed on it by the need to find its words and search through its memory. In that case one can write only with great attention.