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February 14.
On the point of view (and how important its choice is). If your thought comes too close to your subject or not close enough, if your expressions come too close to your thought or not close enough, the true point of view is missed. Then there is no more charm. Charm is indispensable, for it calls or holds the attention.
Charm is so inherent in certain subjects that, however they are treated, it is found in them; but only for some.
For it to be found by everyone, one must choose the beautiful aspects, clear words, the true point of view.
Everything has its point of view. On this side and beyond it there is fault, and one must correct it.
It is not enough that the object presented should be itself; it must also be lit as it should be and shown at the proper distance. Everything is a picture and must be made and treated as a picture.
Charm does not always come from adornment; indeed, it rarely does. To please, many subjects must be naked, but none can do without the aid of perspective.
(And in mathematics? In mathematics, there is configuration; consequently, its point of view is that the figure should show of itself only itself...)
Curiosity suffices to make certain matters pleasant. Then the pleasure found in reading certain books comes not from them, but from the reader’s mind and disposition. When a book lacks this merit, one may read it with pleasure, but without esteem. One uses it and takes pleasure in it out of need. Once the need is satisfied, it displeases one and one throws it away.
The plenum is only a large sponge. If one pressed it, if one made the void come out of it, it would not fill the hand. The fluid is a vapor that one could reduce to a drop; a cloud, a piece of meshwork, is an image of the plenum.
... eaux, ... roseaux. One would say that one of these words sees its reflection in the other. (Vid. the verses: At the foot of Mount Adula...)
To speak abstractly is to figure beings that are not and that we do not conceive as being (at least as substances). To speak metaphysically is to figure invisible beings that are, that we conceive as being. Thus nature is an abstract word; soul is a metaphysical word, as is God.
February 16.
Time is an abstract word. Eternity partakes less of abstraction than of metaphysics, because it first calls to mind a world and an attribute of that world which we conceive as being, and it transports us beyond etc. — Remarkably, immensity is less abstract than space. The Supreme Being is an abstract word; God is not, and my God still less. The language of the mystics, which one would be tempted to think so abstract, is nevertheless not so: it is not metaphysical... All properly abstract language, on the contrary, has for the mind that kind of hardness and unpleasantness that the surface of cold, poorly filed matter has for the senses. The intellectual world supplies the mind with no abstraction: it is the real world. Every abstraction is made by a stripping away and can be employed, serve, take on body and appearance only through a certain filling in. Imagine the skins of thousands of men stuffed and joined into a single trunk, and you will have the human species.
Reason is an abstract word. Gentleness and goodness are not. They are not metaphysical but affective, a kind that has not been sufficiently noticed and that should be adopted for exactness in the division.
It seems that the names of qualities belonging to the affective are only those of qualities that are lovable. The names of those that are not approach abstraction, as severity, austerity, wickedness.
Finally, everything that relates only to the operations of the rational mind sets up etc. Everything that expresses only the doctrine of the schools and what they have established is abstract only. What relates to the whole man and to the way he is conceived by all minds is abstract, affective, or simply metaphysical, but never merely abstract. The school (not the ancient school and that of the colleges), but our own, the modern one, where study brings all the learned together, the school, I say, has filled our mind with abstractions, and our mind has filled our language, our manners, our laws with them.
These abstractions have spoiled us; and when I say us, I say me; me too.
Voltaire. A mind that never rested.
February 16.
When a people chooses a government, there is a necessity that makes it choose the one it prefers.
[I do not do] all that I ought, nor all that she deserves.
The madwoman and the idle dreamer of the house.
February 17.
On light. — To make it a substance distinct from the stars whose movement distributes it to us. Let one picture the coarse wheels of our mills, which break up the water falling on them and reduce it to vapor spreading in all directions. So it is that light is disseminated by them. They sprinkle the universe with it. Or let one conceive them as lamps into which light flows and gathers like an ethereal oil that fills them. They distill it through thousands of invisible wicks.
God is God. Nothing is God but himself.
The population of a state is composed not of children who are born, but of children who live.