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Thursday, February 27 (antequadrag.)
That to be pious one must make oneself small. Thus postures that diminish the body—those, for example, that by making us bend our limbs reduce its volume or incline its height—favor piety. We must also bend our soul, bring it back upon itself. But, someone will say, what of S[uperstitio]n? S[uperstitio]n is the excess of a good thing. Nevertheless, it must be avoided.
February 28.
Piety moves us to annihilate ourselves before God. Is this expression not accepted?
We refer thought to the head as we refer pain to the foot. The soul is in the whole body; but if it is in the whole body, one can conceive its middle and its extremities at the two ends. However much we say that it has no extension, we can conceive it only as bounded and consequently circumscribed. One cannot conceive, it has been said, half or a quarter of a soul. No, for in conceiving it as bounded one conceives it as indivisible. It is a monad. Can one conceive half a soap bubble?
My effluvia are the dreams of a shadow.
March 1.
Every thick body is only a pasteboard divisible by exfoliation into an infinity of layers thinner still than one can imagine. An invisible glue is the principle of adherence that unites these delicate layers. Tenuity applied to tenuities produces the dense.
Length is divisible into points, and every extended body is a kind of chessboard composed of flat, full points that are its matter and hollow or empty points that are its pores or voids. Everything is net, everything is mesh in extension as in thickness; everything is paper, everything is pasteboard.
Whatever enemy he faces, it is not beautiful for a warrior to shed blood outside combat.
Every stone is a paste that has dried. Every metal is a body in fusion that has cooled and hardened. All matter is ductile, or fusible, or malleable, or everything can be divided into invisible, impalpable parts by crushing and pulverization if it is a solid body, and by evaporation if it is already fluid. Marble and lead can become a cloud, from evaporation to evaporation.
Wood is composed of lines or strands laid against one another; it is fusible. Stone is made of agglomerated grains of dust; it is fusible, crystal is hardened water. Pumice is calcined: it is a stone’s white charcoal; it has little water. Water is a liquid crystal, as the poets have said.
March […].
Every surface offers a weave or transverse lines crossing in every direction...
Sheet of water, thinned sheet... A windowpane is a hardened sheet, a sheet of glass. It is a kind of vaporous efflorescence...
Enamel, color...
Analysis: in morals, in cooking.