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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[LOCKE]

One speaks to oneself in-metaphors. One is naturally drawn to it as a means of understanding oneself better and more easily retaining one’s own thoughts, which one thus labels in a kind of cartouche.

“In a cartouche of light.” Y.

Metaphysics. A great science in which everything is true, even what is contradictory, as in a vast landscape the same towers are round and square.

March […]9 (April?)

Fontanes. Alas! he has lost awareness of his talent and the feeling for the beauties of his own poetry!

April […]9.

A public square must not be surrounded by private houses, or it is only a void, a space.

To change a note. The power of a note in music. Words of the soul, words of the mind. The difference between grammar and poetry.

April […]0.

Soft beauties, and masculine beauties (or strong ones).

Of chapters. And of what is suited and sufficient to form their matter.

As though God had wished to try...

Every month, the feast for the dead.

Fontanes. His colors are too soft. There is some too much blended, some liquefied.

—and to speak, I wait until you are all silent. When minds have settled... And besides, my clouds must be allowed to gather and condense. Nubes cogens Jupiter.

April 21.

“The human heart wants to admire,” says Chateaubriand (reflections on Iphigenia).

T189.The unusual hyphen in en-métaphores is mirrored in English. The source editor supplies the feminine ending in un[e]; English a has no equivalent gender ending, so the supplied letter has no bracketed counterpart. Cartouche denotes an ornamental frame or panel for an inscription; the following paragraph makes it a cartouche of light.

T455.Native crop confirms the unusual hyphen in en-métaphores; retained. The source editor supplies only the e of un[e]; its grammatical intervention remains visible. Y. is not expanded. The left edge of 339 damages the continuations of aisément and cartouche; both are recovered from surviving endings.

T458.The terminal 9 survives; any preceding numeral is damaged. The date is not inferred from neighboring entries.

T190.Mâles is rendered masculine, with the author’s alternative strong retained. Molles is rendered soft; the translation does not add an explicit feminine counterpart absent from the text.

T460.The day is clipped; the terminal 0 survives and no preceding numeral is inferred.

T191.The source substantivizes trop fondu and liquéfié. The English retains the compressed, unfinished quality of the description instead of replacing it with a general judgment of weak style.

T192.Nubes cogens Jupiter means Jupiter gathering clouds. The Latin phrase follows Joubert’s own clouds, preserving the mythological comparison without assigning particular thoughts to them.

T461.The unfinished Quand clause is retained. The Latin is not replaced by a modern paraphrase.

S1.Source editor’s annotationGénie du Christianisme, part 2, book II, chapter 8; volume II, page 88. “It is natural to fear death, and yet a victim who laments dries the tears that were being shed for her. The human heart wants more than it can do. Above all it wants to admire; it has within itself an impulse toward I know not what unknown beauty, for which it was created at its origin.”

T193.The bibliographical reference and the quotation remain within one source-apparatus paragraph. The English is translated afresh from the French quoted by Beaunier. The feminine victim in the Iphigenia context is represented by her.