Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[LOCKE]

February […].

“To learn to die,” says Plato. It does more: it teaches us to be dead by training us for the life that must come afterward.

In the efforts of reminiscence, we search. — Where do we search? where? in our idea,—in the canvas, in the mirror, in the atmosphere between the senses and the mind.

February 12.

We are in life to act more than to know. But to know even this, that we are in life to, etc., one must know. And this itself, knowing, is acting. It is one of our duties.

It is there above all that a clarity greater than that of light itself should be found. Clariores luce: this expression of the law suits philosophy.

I have known no reasoner by profession whose mind was not unsound.

It is better to be platonic; I do not say a Platonist.

February 13.

The materialists abuse abstractions even more than the subtlest spiritualists (and at the very least with an inconsistency for which the latter cannot be reproached). For example, the idea they attach to their word[s], nature, matter, the whole.

It is the priesthood, that is, a condition with much meditation and leisure, that gave Hebrew literature its existence and its perfection.

February 11.

Fire cannot burst forth without burning some air.

Fire (it is said) keeps one company; that is because it makes one reflect. In physics above all there is no spectacle more inspiring than fire. The posture, the silence, the place, and the kind of reverie one is always in while warming oneself also help give the mind attention and activity. The hearth is a Pindus, and the muses are there.

February 10.

In Locke. — But because we will not know how a lock is made,—are we therefore plunged into night and darkness?

Sometimes I say to my mind: Eheu! si qua fata aspera rumpat!

February 17.

One would say that in eyes so black there is flame without light.

T44.The feminine elle has no explicit noun here; philosophy is a plausible antecedent, but the English leaves it as it. To be dead is deliberately distinct from to die.

T45.Toile can denote a canvas or cloth; canvas is chosen alongside mirror. The repeated where and the intermediate atmosphere are retained, without identifying one image as the final explanation.

T46.Clariores luce means clearer than light. Joubert calls it an expression of the law and applies it to philosophy; no particular legal citation is supplied in the source.

T47.The French distinguishes platonique from platonicien. English platonic and Platonist preserves the contrast between a quality or disposition and adherence to a philosophical school; a narrower modern romantic sense is not imposed.

T48.Spiritualistes here names opponents of materialism, not practitioners of communication with the dead. The source editor supplies plural endings in leur[s] mot[s]; English their already covers both possessive forms, while word[s] preserves the visible noun intervention.

T49.The construction ne peut ... qu’il ne means cannot ... without. Joubert’s statement that fire burns air remains his historical physical claim, without a modern scientific correction to the text.

T50.Pindus is invoked as a home of the muses. The capitalized place and lower-case muses follow the source; the hearth is compared to a Pindus, not simply labeled as the mountain.

T54.The source prints future ignorerons, retained as will not know. The present-tense question that follows is not regularized to match it. In Locke remains the source’s roman Latin cue.

T51.Eheu! si qua fata aspera rumpat! means Alas! If somehow he or it could break through harsh fate! The printed rumpat is third person singular, not the second-person rumpas; its unexpressed subject is not expanded in the text. The Latin remains in the words spoken to the mind.