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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On movement.]

Disabused of fashionable opinions. — Clouds of opinion: hide the heavens. They paint and color phantoms. They bring forth an obscurity, a vapor. They envelop us in it. They make a brightness, figures, a doctrine shine in it. They deceive us.

The world and the room; books and the magic lantern.

On abandon, or abandonment, of mind.

June […].

The laziness of scholars (for laborious minds also have their laziness) is the cause of the obscurities with which philosophical idiom too often wearies the mind. One adopts the first expression that comes, another the expression adopted by this one, and imperceptibly a jargon creeps in... What does J.-J. himself mean when he writes that relations etc... Nothing excuses us from being clear, and as clear as possible, if the matter is worth the trouble and especially if it is at all new.

June 10.

The man who called the word nature “one of the most dangerous words in the French language” was right. There are others, and in great number.

The drawback of words that pass from speculation into practice and from writings into speech.

Dangerous words (in philosophical language). Causes of their dangers.

June 12.

Man naturally does metaphysics and morals, as a bird makes its nest, because he feels that he is [ ] and his destiny.

June 14.

The little reasons in which the mind goes astray.

To give body to what is purely intellectual is a merit; but to give it passions, action, is an abuse. That is the dominant fault in the style of the Necker school. They speak to you of “a thought impatient to become a law” etc. In this kind of writing, give form, but do not give life. We forgive the father, however, because etc.

Solitude gives us a self.

The self that gives solitude. It is in our thoughts, while the self the world gives is in our feelings. For solitude accustoms us to look at ourselves, to contemplate ourselves; the world, to act for ourselves.

June 16.

Dig as you will, you see only envelopes. Lift a hundred, lift a thousand: you will always be stopped before lifting the last. You think you touch the essence when you strip off outer skins. The spermatic animalcule: you think that is the animal. But it lies much deeper. These worms, these needles etc. are only... The true principle of life, the germ, the essence, the point in which the animal is contained etc.

In each drop is a drop, in each point another point.

— The last is a worm; but what is in the worm?

Note. By contrast, works of art, in which there is nothing inside.

June 20.

To classify truths by their natures. Importance of this attention.

Truths of one order and truths of another. For example, that each man has received his companion from heaven: that is not a truth of the schools, nor a truth of feeling, nor a civil and political truth; but it is a feeling and, so to speak, a religious truth.

June 21.

The bonds of an eternal cherishing.

T10.Disabused keeps the opening as an unattached plural form, rather than supplying an addressee. The clouds retain their agency in painting and coloring the phantoms.

T11.World retains monde, which can also evoke social life in contrast with the private room. The magic lantern remains the visual apparatus named in the comparison.

T12.Abandon and abandonment preserve the two related nouns, abbandon and abbandonnement, rather than reducing them to one. Their object is the mind or spirit.

S1.Source editor’s annotation“June 8, mal.”

T13.J.-J. and the unfinished reference to relations remain unexpanded. The day in the main date label is clipped in the facsimile; the separate source annotation quotes 8 juin, mal. Its mal. is retained without guessing an expansion.

T14.The French edition supplies the article [la] before morale. English morals takes no corresponding article, so that bracketed intervention is recorded here. The empty brackets after is reproduce the source’s empty bracket pair; the unfinished syntax has not been completed.

S2.Source editor’s annotation“Of the 13th. — To Mme de G-n-s. Yes, those who are not dangerous — For that is just, that is inevitable, and that is useful. They speak of population — but here are fully grown men, and why do I say fully grown? fully educated — and with a costly, difficult, excellent education — accustomed, moreover, to both good and bad fortune and more interested than all the others in the tranquility of a country to which they have so longed to return.” — “Of the 14th, end of the readings.”

T15.The source annotation retains the abbreviated addressee Mme de G-n-s and its distinct dates, the 13th and 14th; no name is supplied. The reference to men returning to a country remains as written.

T16.Give form and give life render figurez and animez in the warning against assigning passions and action to intellectual things. Father is left as the source’s designation, and its final because etc. remains unfinished.

T3.The second paragraph actually prints Moi qui donne la solitude, literally The self that gives solitude. That reading reverses the direction of the preceding sentence. The French and English retain it; a possible reading with que in place of qui would mean The self that solitude gives, but has not been adopted without further evidence. The two paragraphs are one block, with no individual date.

T188.The source prints Moi qui donne la solitude; retained without silently changing qui to que or inserting a pronoun.

T17.Envelopes and outer skins preserve the successive coverings in the image. Spermatic animalcule retains the historical term, without replacing Joubert’s account by a modern biological explanation. The last in the later paragraph follows the French feminine la dernière, without supplying an explicit noun.

S1.Source editor’s annotationOn the same date, Joubert notes: “In P. Corneille’s speech of thanks to the Académie française, speaking of his joy, he says that it has produced in him ‘an inward liquefaction that has relaxed all the powers of his soul’.

T18.Note belongs to Joubert’s text. In the separate source annotation, the quotation from Corneille closes within a quotation from Joubert that the edition leaves unclosed; the English keeps that incomplete outer quotation.

T19.Truth of feeling and feeling preserve vérité de sentiment and sentiment. The apparent distinction is not harmonized away.

S2.Source editor’s annotationOf June 22: “Dream. Size, stature, age that seems to be that of angels. Perfection of a youth that has acquired its maturity and can have no decline. Charm, character, appearance of an eternal newness.”