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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On movement.]

God’s memory. His imagination.

Parny. He is glory’s b-rd-chᵒ [catamite], and what a glory. He has prostituted himself for her. He has stripped naked. And for those small coins called posts, Institute, he has publicly shown, without modesty or restraint, everything a man ought to hide.

What is the Revolution? A change that came about, etc. A pride swelled all men.

“Sound must echo sense.” This expression is Pope’s. It is very beautiful.

July 18.

We must therefore conform our laws, our morals, to the idea we have of that life for which we are inevitably destined. We must also conform to it another thing, the most important and most obligatory of all our occupations. What is it? The education of our children.

(In Plat.) The Greeks took pleasure in speaking their language. It charmed them; they loved to feel it flow either beneath their pen or from their mouth.

Boileau. A great poet, but in half-poetry.

On the language of the Greeks. — The fact is that their language was easy, and it was easy because elegant constructions were commonplace in it. It was spoken with the same purity by the people and by authors. Thus allusions to popular proverbs are frequent and almost perpetual in the most polished writers. Plato is full of them. Now allusions give the most magic to style and the most amusement to the writer’s mind, which takes delight, rest, and renewed life in them. In France we have said that “maxims were the proverbs of cultivated people,” and in Athens the maxims of cultivated people and the proverbs of the marketplace were one and the same thing.

July 19.

Every author’s mind has its faults. But not every author shows his in his works. We forgive them in those who know how to hide them.

July 19. (Before sunrise.)

Utility: is it not the fruit, the good, the pleasure one draws from use? Every use presupposes two realities: that of the thing that serves and of the thing that makes use of it. One will agree, at least, that a constant use bound up with the daily needs of our life presupposes in the thing used a reality as perfect as that of our life itself. Thus every utility in opinions presupposes some truth, that is, some reality in the existence of what we believe. This is how utility is a sign of truth.

Even the chimeras of dreams have as much reality as the life or waking state we have then, for it too is chimerical.

They will say I speak with subtlety. It is sometimes the mind’s only means of penetration, owing to the very nature of the truth it wishes to reach, or to the nature of either the opinions or the ignorances through which it is reduced to making its way and painfully opening an exit or an avenue.

Sunday, July 20.

Fontanes. O! poet worthy of Bonaparte!

Delille. Lines of verse: he molds them strongly enough, but does not animate them.

T58.The consonantal abbreviation b-rd-chᵒ remains as printed, followed by the source editor’s expansion in translated form, [catamite]. Bardache is a historical obscene term for a young male sexually used by men, as recorded by the Académie’s 1798 dictionary. Joubert applies it figuratively to Parny’s relation to glory. Posts and Institute preserve the institutional rewards named as small coins.

S1.Source editor’s annotationOn another page, on the same date: “Pope says in his Essay on Criticism that sound must above all echo sense; the sound must seem an echo to the sense. Charming expression, and very exact! Vid. Spectat. vol. VIII., p. 109.)”

T59.The main sentence translates Joubert’s French wording. The separate source annotation also quotes Pope in English; that English line is retained exactly, alongside a translation of Joubert’s French restatement. The unmatched closing parenthesis in the source citation remains.

T60.In Plat. is retained as an abbreviated Latin reference to Plato; no work or passage is supplied.

T61.Half-poetry retains the unusual demi-poësie rather than reducing it to an ordinary judgment of lesser poetry.

S2.Source editor’s annotationMany erasures. And Joubert notes: “18th, revised 19th.” And, at the end of the paragraph: “Look again at what I noted on the language of the Romans 3 years ago, in one of the notebooks covered in parchment.” These parchment covers were removed for binding. Joubert used them, I believe, as ordinary leaves when these notebooks were full. And Paul de Raynal generally recopied onto the first leaves of the notebook the thoughts that thus disappeared.

T62.Commonplace renders triviales, describing familiar usage rather than insignificance. Cultivated people renders honnêtes gens in its social and literary sense. The source prints Elles étoit parlée, with plural pronoun and singular verb; English It follows the evident language reference without reproducing the agreement error. The separate source annotation retains Beaunier’s I believe qualification about the notebook covers. The relative qui s’y égaye can describe the writer or his mind; the English takes the latter reading without excluding the former.

T64.Waking state retains veille even in the account of dreams. It leaves the French elle’s reference to life or waking state open; the apparent paradox is not resolved.

T65.Penetration, exit, and avenue preserve the spatial vocabulary. Ignorances retains the plural rather than turning it into a single abstract state.

S1.Source editor’s annotationThere is simply “Del.” I am not absolutely sure it is Delille, for whom Joubert had great admiration.

T66.The edition prints Delille in the text, but Beaunier’s separate source note states that the manuscript has only Del. and that the identification is uncertain. The English preserves both the name and that qualification.

T205.The source annotation qualifies the edition’s expanded Delille: the manuscript has only Del. Do not make the identification certain.