Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[LOCKE]

August 14.

(At the baths.) Piety defends us against ourselves, modesty defends us against others.

August 23.

(5 in the morning. Insomnia.) Everything must have its sky. Put some everywhere.

August 24.

There are many situations in life that, on finding oneself in them, one suddenly believes one has seen in a dream.

The sky, or perspective, is what makes poetry. Echo is what makes music. Light and dark in painting. What is dreamed, or the hollow of the brain, in all things. The soul, finally, or the mind and the spiritual world, etc. Space.

Tragic actors. They express sensation more than feeling.

August 30.

Formed style.—Of a man who has dreamed much with himself, or of a man who has arranged in advance the tone in which he will write. There is a great difference between these two formed styles. The latter is merely labor, a mechanism of the trade. The other is a true operation of the mind. Thus it has naturalness; reflection is natural, like the outpouring.

September 2.

When a beautiful word offers a more beautiful meaning than the author’s, one must adopt it.

September 6.

Voltaire. It is impossible for him to satisfy and impossible for him not to please.

Thus admiration that comes by a way other than the eyes does not favor love.

September 7

That all beautiful words can bear more than one sense (or meaning).

Voltaire. Variety. Less in the mind than in the subjects with which he occupied [it].

August […].

Such is the nature of this work that the very name of the subject must not be in the title. I shall call it: “Of Man.”

T256.Ciel may mean sky or heaven. Sky preserves the spatial image developed in the nearby note on perspective without ruling out its spiritual resonance. The following Put some everywhere remains an instruction-like fragment.

T257.Le rêvé is rendered what is dreamed. The hollow of the brain remains a concrete and unusual image; the separate light and dark are not condensed into the technical word chiaroscuro.

T258.Fait describes a style that has taken form; it does not by itself condemn that style as artificial. Jet is rendered outpouring, retaining the image of an immediate flow beside reflection, which Joubert also calls natural.

T259.The final it is read as the more beautiful meaning offered by the word. The English leaves the pronoun in place, while this note makes the reading explicit.

S1.Source editor’s annotationOn this same date, Joubert is reading Letters of L. B. Lauragais. Paris, Buisson, 1802. “September 7. It was Corneille who was great, who was generous, and not Augustus (says Mr. de L. concerning the famous Let us be friends, Cinna.—To be beyond... limits, and one no longer returns within them once outside (page 93). As though the same barrier that forbids so many men to pass beyond it prevented these sublime minds from coming back within it.—One no longer learns it at 20 (Mr. de-L. says of geometry), and to fill one’s head with it, one must have it empty (page 106).—Would you be displeased to learn (N.B. Instead of the word learn, the text has these words: that Newton and Locke have taught us. See Lock.) that one of the best ways of filling one’s head with geometry was to have it empty? Yet this is so true that one no longer learns it at 20. Would you be displeased to learn that, the mind of geometry being the mind of geometers, it is almost unheard of for them to have another, and are really fit and good only for doing geometry, never knowing what they do until the analysis they employ has told them? Would you be very displeased to learn that, employing an admirable instrument that nothing can wear out or break, geometers can with impunity have very little mind, because that of geometry supplies what they lack; and can even have a very false one, because the accuracy of geometry sets it straight? Finally, would you be displeased to learn that geometry has its charlatans, like medicine and geometry? (sic) He adds: D’Alembert, who had (and of his own) much of every kind of mind, often spoke to me of Maupertuis’s mathematical charlatanries (page 106).” And still other quotations from the same work... “And he quotes Voltaire, who says (article style, philosophical dictionary): Jesting is never good in the serious genre, because it always bears on only one side of things, which is not the one being considered (that is to say, doubtless: which one ought to consider). Voltaire here condemns the use he himself has almost always made of jesting, having always applied it to very serious things, since they were much respected. Evening of September 8.”

T260.The entire source annotation is one paragraph spanning pages 348–349. Its quotations, internal N.B., parenthetical fragments, and final September 8 date are retained. The repeated geometry followed by (sic) is not corrected. The phrase and are preserves an irregular change of grammatical construction. Esprit ranges between mind, intelligence, and intellectual character; mind is repeated to retain the argument’s play on a geometrical mind and a geometer’s own mind.

T261.French retains il’occupoit. English supplies [it], taking the intended construction provisionally as il l’occupoit, with the mind as its object. A reflexive reading is also conceivable. The bracket marks this unresolved intervention rather than presenting the missing pronoun as visible print.