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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

TRAVEL

November 12.

Imagination is preeminently the faculty of clothing in body and figure what has none. Imagination is a painter. It paints within our soul and outwardly for the soul of others. It clothes in images.

Condillac. This man is lake, pool or basin, pond or reservoir, but is not a spring.

O living spring of thoughts! O fountain of intelligence!...

November 21.

If men of imagination are sometimes dupes of appearances, cold minds are as often dupes of their combinations.

November 4.

To analyze, to decompose. — What they call analysis with such grandiloquence is what was called division when people spoke simply.

One must analyze one’s subject with oneself, that is, consider all its faces and examine it in parts, turn it and turn it again; but one must not analyze one’s thought with one’s reader. One must say everything in a word and all at once after examining everything at length and repeatedly. The writer must make himself like the painter. The painter considers his model feature by feature, but it is the whole that he shows. Light illuminates us not ray by ray, but in beams.

November 5.

Those deaf and mute from birth hear through their feet and have, so to speak, ears in their heels. That is, the soles of their feet are endowed with such sensitivity that the slightest noise made by striking the surface of the ground on which they stand is easily transmitted to them through the concussion.

Note. The deaf man who was anxious to know whether he would rise again with hearing.

November 25.

Phantoms of thoughts!...

November 26.

If prayer does not change our destiny, it changes our feelings, a usefulness no less great.

November […]8.

Truly spiritual thoughts touch the mind, and it feels them with delight. (But here, neither pleasure nor usefulness.)

How admiration contributes to the repose of the mind of man and is necessary to it.

Condillac. He dries and stiffens my mind.

December […]4.

Mr. Necker. His style is a language one must not speak, but must apply oneself to understanding if one does not wish to be deprived of understanding a multitude of useful, important, great, and new thoughts.

On the curiosities and difficulties that naturally present themselves to the mind and torment all men. And on those that torment only scholars and are ills of study or of the schools.

T15.Body, figure, painter, and clothing preserve the sequence. The final clothes in images remains without a supplied object.

T16.Lake, pool, basin, pond, reservoir, spring, and fountain keep the distinctions between held water and its living source.

T37.Grandiloquence renders emphase in its pejorative historical sense of affected pomp in speech, rather than neutral emphasis.

T17.Faces, parts, turning, model, features, rays, and beams preserve the comparison between private examination and the whole presented to a reader.

T18.Concussion renders commotion as transmitted physical shaking, not a head injury. The account is left as Joubert states it; the following Note belongs to his text and concerns resurrection.

T19.Spiritual translates spirituelles beside esprit, mind; the adjective can also describe mental qualities or wit. The parenthetical denial of pleasure and usefulness remains unexplained in the fragment.

T20.Admiration renders admiration here without an explicit Cartesian enumeration; the word may also carry the sense of wonder.

T49.The beginning of the date is clipped; the surviving terminal form supports 4, without a complete day. Clipped initial continuation letters in intelligence are restored from the visible stem and the prior line’s l’in-. The r in Mʳ is raised.