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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[LOCKE]

March 27.

Condillac. That wearies like a false light.

Old age. Must indeed have been more honored in times when each person could scarcely know more than what he had seen.

But do these tiresome dissertators on inversions not see that eloquence, and above all great eloquence, that of Bossuët, lives only by inversions, not of words, but of feelings, of thoughts:—O night, etc. Enemy powers... You live...

Flowers.—Tulip.—All the colors of the palette are there.

Inversion. It is therefore neither what comes first in the order of sensations nor what comes first in the order of ideas that must be shown to the mind first, but what must most strike the listener or the beholder. Whether the arrow was made before the bow, or the bow before the arrow, does not matter: it is the arrow that must be launched and the point that must be directed forward.

March 28.

Monarchy. O society that preserves men and God!

... As though, to raise itself higher or to show its elevation, a statue made its pedestal sink back into the earth. (Pushing down one’s inferior.)

Such works can no longer, in advanced age, satisfy the person who makes them. And I would willingly say to F.: do you really dare occupy yourself with trifles and be satisfied with so little.

If man resists the climate, as you prove very well, can he not also resist his own temperament? The life of the Desert Fathers (a portion of human history) shows it clearly on every page.

Education. A means of civil order (better than spectacles, cafés, the tavern, etc.)

Louis XIV’s saying: “There are no more Pyrenees.” That is not what made Spain and France friends; it was rather the conquest of Franche-Comté, which, leaving no further cause of discord between the two nations, made Spain return within her own borders, where we have nothing to envy her. Spain and France are and must remain united because there are Pyrenees.

Tradere memoriae, the Latins used to say. What one writes must therefore be easy to retain. From this purpose of books comes the principal rule to be observed in writing them.

T157.Faux jour can mean an unfavorable or misleading light. False light preserves the physical comparison without specifying the defect of Condillac’s argument beyond the source.

T170.Devoit is read inferentially as must have been in light of the explanation about the limits of earlier knowledge. The alternative sense ought to have been, expressing an obligation or deserved honor, remains possible.

T158.The contrast is between inversions of words and those of feeling or thought. The final allusions remain incomplete, with their ellipses and etc.; no fuller text is inserted.

T160.Conservatrice is rendered by preserves, keeping both men and God as its objects. The translation does not replace the strange latter claim with preservation of religion.

T161.P.p. du désert abbreviates the Desert Fathers; English expands this conventional designation. The historical spelling tempéramment remains in French. Évidemment is rendered clearly, referring to the force of the demonstration.

T162.Police is used in its broad historical sense of order and regulation in society. Spectacles retains the general word for public entertainments rather than identifying a particular theatrical genre.

T163.Tradere memoriae means to hand down or commit to memory. The retained Latin phrase provides the basis for Joubert’s rule about what books should make easy to remember.