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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

Watelet: Poem on Painting.

...want to make a beautiful day out of evening and night.

That: no one is permitted to devote another of them.

November […]7.

The child pronounces words with memory long before pronouncing them with the tongue.

Sunday, November 26.

(Saint Cloud.) Brains that can digest only what other brains have already worked up. They need objects to pass through others’ thought in order to see and judge them well. Images alone can make them understand realities.

November […]9.

Subtlety of mind that nature gives. It is talent, a skill or aptitude of the mind for grasping fine things and what is fine and most exquisite in all things. It is a great means of illuminating.—Subtlety of mind that nature does not give. It is merely knavery, an art of swindling questions, an artifice, a skill in making things disappear.

December […]4.

Dereligion.

December […]5.

Ranks. Love of order, which is not uniformity.

December […]1.

And perhaps the capacity to love is like the capacity to drink. A little wine and a little love take away the reason of those whose head is not strong... The rush to the brain...

Loving and hating are not brothers.

The ambition to reign over a man.

December 22.

That: one must imitate in hollow in order to imitate with grace.

T286.Dévouer can mean dedicate, consecrate, or give without reserve, including giving a person up to death. Devote leaves that range open. En has no recoverable antecedent within this fragment; another of them is provisional. The English does not supply a cause, vow, or sentence to which another person is committed.

T546.The left margin damages the date; the surviving terminal numeral is retained without inferring the lost preceding digit.

T547.The beginning of Dimanche is damaged but the word is recoverable; the day numeral 26 is clear. The printed weekday/date combination is retained without calendar correction.

T287.Délié suggests fineness and delicacy, kept in repeated fine. Escroquer and escamoter carry images of fraud and conjuring: questions are swindled, and things made to disappear. The figurative offenses are not reduced to merely being mistaken.

T548.The left margin damages the date; the surviving terminal numeral is retained without inferring the lost preceding digit.

T288.Dereligion carries the unusual French déréligion into English. It suggests an undoing or loss of religion, without silently replacing Joubert’s formation with the familiar irreligion.

T549.The left margin damages the date; the surviving terminal numeral is retained without inferring the lost preceding digit.

T550.The left margin damages the date; the surviving terminal numeral is retained without inferring the lost preceding digit.

T289.The capacity to love and the capacity to drink are compared without specifying an object of love. Transport au cerveau preserves the bodily rush to the brain and its unfinished ellipsis.

T551.The left margin damages the date; the surviving terminal numeral is retained without inferring the lost preceding digit.

T290.En creux can name an incised or recessed form, as in a mold or intaglio engraving, rather than relief. In hollow retains Joubert’s unusual phrasing and its connection to his recurrent hollow images. The fragment does not name a particular medium or explain how this manner of imitation produces grace.

T552.The leftmost edge of the first 2 is damaged, but both 2 glyphs remain identifiable in the native image. A terminal rule follows; ANNÉE 1803 begins on 354.