Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1801

March 1.

Ease of thought. A mind that abounds in thought as the tongue of a fluent chatterer abounds in words. Bacon. He seems to me to have more measure than weight. If his writings were to perish, what would we lose?

April.

1st Long-champ.

2nd Cloister of the Invalides. Sunset. Fine weather. Fontanes and Chateaubrillant.

3rd Modesty and beauty (in the churches).

4th Beginning. Holy Saturday.

6th With more will than intelligence.

April 10.

Chateaubriant. “Chaste style in all things” etc.

April 12.

Leibnitz’s reasoning is very good. We have certain ideas that are innate in us because we have an understanding that is innate in us and can no more subsist without some representations than a mirror exposed to broad daylight and to many objects can subsist without images. We carry within ourselves the ideas (or rather the germs of ideas) that the senses could not give us and that are nevertheless indispensable to us.

There is nothing in the understanding that has not entered through our senses except the understanding itself, and consequently except the notions and ideas without which the understanding could not subsist.

If we do not consider our mind as a substance, then there is no longer clarity in any of the questions that have our mind as their object. But if we conceive and consider it as a substance, it necessarily follows, etc.

April 13.

I do not want the passions to be treated in prose. Why this is dangerous. Poet contained within meter and harmony... Dignity etc.

April 14.

O cooks who prepare wisdom for us! And who do not know how to nourish yourselves on it!

The poet. He paints the passions under glass.

April 16.

Observe that after innocence, the most beautiful things in the world are affliction and repentance. I speak of that beauty of expression these feelings give our features.

April 21.

Christianity. One can neither speak against it without anger nor speak of it without love.

April […]4-25.

Fontanes’s style. Is a colored paste applied to white paper.

April […]9.

The soul kneads its judgments within itself as the bee kneads its wax. It makes its honey otherwise. The honey flows within it, exhales from it as fragrance comes from flowers.

April […]0.

... had come from it as an element and returns to it as an individual.

T19.Measure and weight preserve mesure and poids as distinct terms. The repeated abundance and the conditional loss remain; the date March 1 remains in its printed position after March 23.

T21.The five ordinal reminders stay together beneath April. The source skips the fifth; no entry is inserted. Long-champ and the two successive Chateaubrillant and Chateaubriant forms remain distinct.

S1.Source editor’s annotationOn April 11, Joubert reads Leibnitz’s correspondence. (Letter to Bierlingius, vol. V, quarto, p. 358. “What he says of Locke. Vid. inf. 12 april.” And, of the same date: “Plato (resolved).”

T42.Vid. inf. 12 april. means See below, April 12. The source’s unclosed parenthesis and abbreviated reference remain, as does the compressed Plato (resolved), without specifying what has been resolved.

T22.Understanding renders entendement, kept distinct from mind for esprit. Subsist repeats subsister, and germs retains the generative image in germes. The mirror comparison and the two exceptions in the next paragraph remain explicit.

T23.The final consequence remains it necessarily follows, etc., without supplying the conclusion.

T24.Meter renders mesure in this poetic context. Contained preserves contenu, including its sense of restraint; the terse reminders remain fragments.

T25.Under glass retains sous verre without replacing the image with a generalized claim about distance or protection.

T26.The separate Is fragment retains the source’s abrupt transition from Style Fontanes. Colored follows American spelling.

T27.Judgments are kneaded like wax; honey is made otherwise. The English takes honey as what flows and exhales within and from the soul, preserving the shift from bee to flowers.

T28.The fragment supplies neither its subject nor the place referred to by en and y. The past perfect and present remain, with element and individual kept distinct.

T217.The left scan edge clips the day: only the retained suffix is legible; no leading digit is supplied. Native crop confirms final 0 and printed venuë; the fragment and its tense change are preserved.