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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[ON KANT.]

Instruments of his designs, we fulfill them without our participation through the course of our existence. Bound to his will, we can satisfy it only through our own. In spite of ourselves and without our knowing it, we do what he has resolved, but not what he wants of us. Our freedom makes us independent of his power in this respect. Thus our fortune and the course of events come from God; our faults come from us alone...

Is the circulation of life from one man into another and from one generation into another generation, then, a spectacle whose contemplation can suffice him? — But, they say, he has other designs. — If you yourselves authorize us to suppose that he has designs, why should we not suppose those that everything leads us to presume and that present themselves so naturally to our minds?

Once this destination is admitted, two tasks are imposed on us. The first is to make ourselves fit for it, the second to make ourselves worthy of it. This destination is double: 1st, to know; 2nd, to be happy. Light and fire will be our eternal portion: the light of God, the fire of his love.

To become fit for it, we must practice knowing what the world does not show and what remains purely unintelligible as long as our senses conceal its presence from us. Everything that raises men’s thought toward [ ], everything that makes them imagine it, makes them fit for the 1st of these destinations, and everything that [ ] makes them worthy of both.

Our thought — soon falls upon duty. Duty! etc.

With regard to ourselves, it is independence from the senses. And, with regard to others, it is constancy in help, forbearance, and support. Help in well-being, help in well-doing, in willing well, in wishing well. Help through cooperation and through resistance, through giving and through refusal, through severity and indulgence, through praise and through blame, through silence and words, through pain and through pleasure. Travelers of the same moment, inhabitants of the same earth, companions on the same road, riding in the same carriage and destined for the same lodging, we must all help one another and, when we arrive, we must first give an account of what we have done for one another’s happiness, for happiness or virtue: we will be repaid for a smile.

(As much as dependence on the senses serves us in fulfilling the vast designs of the great [ ] and in helping our companions, so much is it, etc., etc., so much does it distance us from them and so much must we flee it. Here begins...)

September 3.

To crack the walnut: one finds a kernel inside; and beneath the thorn is the chestnut.

September 6.

In my dwellings. I want there always to be much sky mingled with little earth; which can happen only when...

September 7.

What idea we can have of God; what idea we can have of the soul. To put the questions this way is a very good means of...

And in what do the various pleasures that books, paintings, conversations, etc. give us consist, if not in their showing us (more or less) naked thoughts, ideas, minds, souls more or less whole, perfect, complete? And what pleases you in the chance arrangements or dispositions of raw nature, if not what resembles, more or less, a thought, a design, designs or thoughts that please us all the more because, not being rigorously determined, they leave us the advantage of conceiving them as we like them best?

The necessity of conceiving. (I have often thought of it.)

So that maturity is capable of all the pleasures of youth in its bloom, and old age capable of all the pleasures of childhood.

It often happens that, by interlacing propositions, one gives an opinion an appearance of solidity it does not in fact possess. In this way, with threads as fine and brittle as those of silk, one makes, with the aid of a loom, fabrics whose weave has strength. Good doctrines are those in which each thread of their fabric has its own truth and clarity.

September 15.

This color you call historical is all the better for serving, in a way, as clothing. Use it, then, in nude figures; but in clothed figures, paint the flesh carefully. Nudity must always carry its veil with it, and clothing must not hide all the nudity. In works of art, finally, the feigned and the true must play together perpetually.

Yes, beautiful as a flute into which no one blows...

Indeed, in the willing conformity of our will to that will as soon as it becomes known to us, there is something divine.

Resignation has something sublime about it; courage is merely strong.

Superstition is the only religion of which base souls are capable. — They are courtiers and not true worshipers.

S3.Source editor’s annotationThis piece is on a separate sheet, marked “1st sheet” and peculiarly dated “7br 2. 17801.” There is no doubt that we should read “1801”: its resemblance to the preceding text and thought proves it. (Cf. the letter to Mme de Beaumont of October 12, 1801.)

T102.The distinctions between designs, resolve, and will remain. The opening divine pronouns are not replaced by a supplied name; God appears explicitly only later in the paragraph.

T108.The written 7br 2. 17801. and Beaunier’s interpretation 1801 remain in separate apparatus. They do not become a date heading for the undated printed block. The masculine ordinal 1er before feminine feuille is rendered by the uninflected English 1st.

T279.The source’s anomalous written year 17801 is retained alongside the source editor’s explicit 1801 interpretation; this is provenance, not an invented date heading. The printed 1er with feminine feuille is retained.

T103.Unintelligible translates the printed inintelligible, which is not emended to intelligible. Both empty brackets remain empty; the referent of it after the first blank is not supplied.

T104.Forbearance reads support as bearing with another, distinguished here from the following soutien, support. Indulgence renders condescendance in the sense of accommodating another, without the modern implication of patronizing.

T105.The old masculine noun un souris means a smile. Will be repaid for a smile follows the preceding accounting for what we have done for others; the literal construction is a smile will be paid to us, which also allows the image of receiving a smile in return.

T106.The repeated autant and the unfinished Here begins remain. The referent of en in distance us from them is uncertain; it may reach back to the designs, companions, or destinations under discussion. The third empty bracket in this block is not filled.

S1.Source editor’s annotationHere we return to the notebook. September 2: “Conversation. Villoison’s dance. — The Turkish ambassador. His father’s shade. The Greek Codiska. The Turks. Their hospitality, their piety, their happiness. The Greeks. A Greek drives away his dog and shuts his door when he wants to eat. Athens. Bœotia, or the Beauce of Greece. Delos. The banks of the Eurotas (shaded by reeds). Wines of Attica (bad). Ephesus, Corinth, etc. Mount Athos, its beauty, its monks, its monasteries, etc. The Greeks’ observances, the only virtues they aim at. No women on Mount Athos; no females (not even a hen). The bostangi who collects the tribute subjects himself to going without women on the monks’ lands, that is, on all of Mount Athos and its dependencies. Beauty of the ruins, etc.”

T107.Cerneau names the walnut kernel; épine remains the singular thorn rather than being expanded into a botanical description of the chestnut’s casing.

T109.These compressed reminders retain the source’s names and claims, including Codiska and bostangi. His father’s shade preserves the possible ghostly sense of ombre without identifying whose father is meant. Beauce remains the place name in the comparison with Bœotia.

T110.The repetitions more or less, designs or thoughts, and whole, perfect, complete remain. Raw nature reads nature brute as nature without deliberate shaping; it does not imply savagery. Conceiving remains the verb taken up in the next entry.

T111.Interlacing, threads, loom, fabrics, and weave retain the sustained textile image. The source’s unaccented ou is read as où, in which; its spelling is retained in French.

T112.Historical preserves historique without identifying a painter or substituting a more specific theory of coloring. The veil, clothing, nudity, and the play of feigned and true remain literal images.

T113.Willing preserves volontaire beside the two occurrences of will. That will remains unexpanded; the source does not name its possessor here.

T114.The French shifts from feminine âmes to masculine Ils. English they retains the collective reference without marking the grammatical gender change.