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The aviary. To be born, give their birdsong, build their nest, and then die.
Or — Could he have made human life only to contemplate its course, consider its cascades, its play and varieties, or give himself the spectacle of hands always in motion passing a torch from one to another?
No. God does nothing except for E[ternity].
Every rule must have some rigidity.
To work for memory — and — that too little thought is given to it.
December 28.
Bodies are a film laid not over our sight, but over the inward and real objects, hiding them from us.
We still know how to mark the hours, but can no longer sound them. The chimes of our clocks have been dismantled.
Whatever anyone may say, Locke had a one-eyed mind.
Leibnitz did not linger enough over the truths he discovered. He went on and, too soon, too quickly, went in search of another. He had some of that lightness that makes one go far but seldom settle.
December 30.
1. To sound all its depths; 2. to feel all its rectitudes (my Olympian memory — and not Olympic); 3. those who have new opinions must open a path for them and prepare a way for them. We should take as our model Adam Billaud, joiner of Nevers: when he published his writings, he began with the brace and ended with the pegs.
December 31.
St. Peter’s in Rome. There one thinks only of the building; and the temple must not make one forget the saint.
On the primitive or Adamic language.
December 16.
These ways of reasoning. It is putting a blindfold over one’s eyes to be more imperturbable.
The dramatic balance and skill in arranging counterweights. That is a very good idea of La Harpe’s (LaHarpe though he is), and it is fundamental. (See page 378, Cours etc., vol. IX.) And on page 99 of the same volume, concerning the “talent for powerfully embracing a subject,” this talent (he says) “consists above all in the art of counterbalancing, with nearly equal forces, the principal means of the action, so that equilibrium lasts until the course of events makes a weight that carries away and precipitates the denouement.” That is very well seen, very well said. But observe that in every well-made work there must be a counterweight, a balancing, an equilibrium. For every work must have a beginning, a middle, and an end, that is, a point of equilibrium and two ends, and when any matter, whatever it may be, is powerfully treated, it is imperceptibly found to have a disposition that perceptibly produces the arrangement of which we speak.
This La Harpe also says very well elsewhere that “defects are born of defects” in our literary compositions “as beauties are born of beauties.”
[La Harpe?] This elegant little mind.