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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1803

To tame to virtue.

January […]3.

The ancients were almost of the opinion that one born robust is born to serve, and that those are born masters who are born intelligent. (They wanted the citizen to appear fit for action, but not fit for labor.) At least that is more or less how Aristotle reasons in his Peripolitikon.

January […]4.

“It is easier (says Mme de G[enlis] to imitate delirium than feeling.” This remark puts both this genre and this talent in their place.

January […]7.

To treat these matters well (metaphysical matters), one must move away from the philosophers and draw as near to the poets as one can.

To know how to put words to use, and to know how to do without them.

There is no good tone without a little contempt for others. Now, it is not impossible to despise a stranger.

The bee and its honey. A drop of its liquor. The nectar bottle. One drop suffices. There is wax there and there is no honey. Here there are verses, but there is no poetry. Nota, the wasps’ honey too. Wasps too go onto flowers, they suck them.

Chateaubriand. He draws with the brush.

January 20.

Is unaware of its own perfumes, like ambergris.

It has been said of Sulzer that “he knew how to draw practical uses from the deepest abstractions (one should have said subtlest).” Fine praise of this philosophical mind! (See Portraits of the Illustrious Men of Switzerland. Zurich, 1782.)

Ideas of crimes. Accounts that spread them. How disastrous.

January 20.

She establishes between our senses and all our perceptions... a distance, an interval and a separation in which everything passes, calms, slows, grows tranquil, and lays down its own excess. She weaves a web for us at this time of life. She spins us an enclosure. She isolates our existence, makes it a sphere apart. She pads its ramparts, increases its solitude, mystery, and security, and makes us as though inaccessible to any immediate assault through etc. ...be freed without her knowledge from perils of which she must be unaware. She keeps the passions away and gives us something like shelter from them through an ideal mechanism like that observed in all productions. She gives us an envelope etc. These first integuments themselves... She surrounds this alcove with incorruptible and light barriers etc. Absolute and completed elsewhere etc.

T28.The French leaves the object of apprivoiser unstated. Tame preserves its image of making familiar or tractable; the short fragment does not identify whom or what is being tamed.

T29.Almost and more or less preserve Joubert’s qualified attribution to the ancients and Aristotle. Fit for action is distinguished from fit for labor. The transliterated title Peripolitikon is retained rather than replaced with a modern bibliographical title.

T30.The source’s parenthesis after easier is unclosed; the English retains it. The bracketed completion G[enlis] remains the source editor’s. This genre and this talent are not expanded into named categories.

T31.Bon ton concerns socially approved manners and speech. The witness prints n’est impossible, and the English retains its negative as is not impossible. The apparent difficulty in the argument is not repaired by deleting not.

T32.The short material comparisons remain fragments, and verses remains distinct from poetry. Nota is Joubert’s Latin reminder, meaning note; his statement about wasps is retained as part of the notebook text.

T33.The source leaves the subject of Ignore unstated. The neutral its does not identify it. Ambre is rendered ambergris because of the perfume comparison: the historical dictionary distinguishes fragrant gray amber from yellow amber.

T34.The parenthetical correction from deepest to subtlest belongs to Joubert and remains within the reported praise. The printed title is translated, and Vid. is rendered See; its bibliographical claim is not replaced with a reconstructed citation.

S1.Source editor’s annotationSeparate leaf.

T35.The feminine Elle has no stated antecedent here; She preserves that absence without identifying a person or faculty. Weaving, spinning, padding, ramparts, sphere, envelope, integuments, and alcove retain the mixed protective images. The source breaks off at par etc. and resumes with the subjunctive soit dégagée; the English keeps the broken transition instead of completing it. Ideal here concerns an operation in thought, not an assertion that the mechanism is perfect.