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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1803

February 10.

Let us mingle Aristotle with Plato; that is to say, let us proceed sometimes like the one and sometimes like the other; to reach truth, which has so many points, so many paths, and so many doors, but requires our mind to fold back in so many ways.

“Order is the law of minds (Malebranche’s expression), God is their bond.” Truth is their spectacle, to love is their happiness, and to know is its nourishment.

February 11.

A physics that resembles morals. What is man (you say). And what is the world? They are indeed and really only what people say. Atoms in the eyes of God.

Affective language, which becomes a fashion.

February 12.

Your gazettes that teach children to kill themselves by giving them the idea of suicide.

Order. To put God into one’s actions, and not merely put him into one’s thoughts.

Indeed—our reasoning tragedies. Nothing arouses pity but what is artless. Terror is the only tragic feeling that can be allied with reflection. (See Michaud.)

February 13.

To say that “God made himself” is a way of expressing his uncreatedness more suited to the weakness of our mind, to which these expressions give at once an idea of beginning proportioned to it, and an idea of eternity suited to God. This manner of speaking contains what befits us and what befits truth.

“I would rather take him ready-made,” Mme de V[intimille] used to say.

Pure mind has its prose as well as its poetry, and I would willingly say: the prose of Aristotle and the poetry of Plato.

“The wings of metaphysics,” as Fénelon says. We have made it a science on four feet. Quadrupedante putrem quatit ungula campum. (Virg.) Its style, however, ought to resemble that which Fénelon attributed to Pellisson, whom he was replacing at the Academy, when he said of him: “His noble and light style resembled the gait of the gods of fable, who flowed through the air without setting foot on the earth.”

February […]5.

In everything: the soul, the body, and the shadow; that is to say, essence, constitution or connected composition, and shadow or appearance. Through its essence, it is; through its constitution, it exists; through its shadow...

I was leaving habit to return to my nature. At that moment, then, the attraction came from nature, habit defended itself; from there came the resistance, or the reluctance toward the attraction.

Pleasures are a point of support, or a point of distraction.

T68.Mingle is repeated from the earlier formulation. Points, paths, doors, and fold back retain the spatial and bodily images; the final movement is not reduced to changing one’s opinion.

T69.The quotation closes before Truth is their spectacle. Its nourishment reads en as referring to the preceding happiness, while leaving the compact relation between love, happiness, and knowledge visible. Spectacle retains what the minds contemplate rather than being replaced with entertainment.

T70.Physique and morale are fields of inquiry here, rendered physics and morals. The first question retains its printed period. Affective in the following entry concerns feeling, not the distinct English word effective.

T71.Naïf is rendered artless, preserving natural and uncontrived expression rather than suggesting foolishness. Reasoning tragedies keeps the criticism of reflection onstage. The incomplete reference Michaud is not expanded.

T72.Incréation denotes not being created. The English retains the deliberately paradoxical God made himself and Joubert’s distinction between the needs of the mind and divine eternity. The next paragraph’s ready-made keeps Mme de V[intimille]’s pointed reply.

T73.The Latin is retained as printed; it evokes a hoof shaking the crumbling field with a four-footed beat. Compared with Aeneid 8.596, the quotation omits sonitu, the sound or beat to which quadrupedante belongs. No missing Latin word is inserted. Fénelon’s comparison is translated from Joubert’s French; flowed preserves couloient rather than substituting a more conventional flight.

S1.Source editor’s annotationFrom February 14 there is a small notebook: “Fénelon, his life, in quarto. Its style is mixed; they have tried to imitate his. But everywhere in it one finds a modern alloy of the worst quality and badly fused. (These people have borrowed leprosy from the Egyptians.) Born frail, and of an aged father who remarried in his old age.—His childhood. The author speaks of it as a man who knew nothing of it. Of the tutor given him, he makes a plainly imaginary portrait. This man’s name is the only thing they have not dared to invent. He makes the pupil a devil of a Greek scholar at twelve, and Fénelon wrote to Bossuet at forty-five: ‘I do not pride myself on understanding Greek.’ [Etc. etc.] Nota. This portrait is of the times. And observe that with so much grace and so much gentleness, Fénelon said of himself to Mme de Maintenon: ‘I am dry,’ and that indeed he sometimes had, to tell the truth, a frankness that resembled rigor. But he treated in this way only those he believed strong and perfect. His letters to Mme de Maintenon are the driest things he wrote, to speak as he did, that is to say, the strictest in truths.”

T74.Is and exists remain distinct, as do essence, connected composition, and appearance. The final through its shadow remains unfinished. English it follows the general In everything rather than inventing a named object.

T76.The entire source annotation remains one paired paragraph. Beaunier’s introductory attribution is distinct from the quoted notebook text; February 14 belongs to that small notebook, not to the damaged main-entry date. The biographical claims and quotations are translated as Joubert records them. Dry and strictest in truths retain his final explanation; [Etc. etc.] remains the source editor’s intervention, and Nota is Joubert’s Latin reminder.

T237.Only terminal 5 survives in the damaged day label. No preceding numeral is inferred.

T238.The note’s February 14 date remains separate from the damaged main date. Clipped initial letters are restored; source alloi and stricte are retained. The facsimile confirms emprumpté. In diable grec, the initial d is lost at the left edge but iable survives; diable is a qualified restoration.

T75.The past narrative remains in the first person. Habit’s self-defense and the resistance to attraction are not smoothed into a single motive; both forces remain active in Joubert’s account.