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

[On Voltaire.]

There is something unhealthy and wounded in these beauties.

June 6.

G[eo]ffr[oy]. One sees in his language at once the good morals of the time and the vices of the man.

A decisive point (a delicate point) that attention alone (and not stirring about) enables one to find, because one can see it but cannot touch it: it is too fine for that.

... This happens when expression presents itself before thought.

June […].

The Greeks... loved truth, but could not resist the desire to adorn her, the opportunity to embellish her. (concerning the name of the nine muses given to the nine books of Herodotus.)

Thus whenever you see a circumstance that is little proved, but by which their imagination must necessarily have been tempted, admit it into the account, but do not make it a point of faith and an article of belief for yourself.

The style of the earliest and finest writers was shorter and more concise. It had more of the style of verse and inscription, which prose succeeded. Later, especially among the Latins, the period was seen entering history, because the historians had their ears full of the eloquence of the forum. Today campo vaccino.

June […]0.

In the etc. to proceed by way of steps or by way of enfilade.

June […]2.

These garments that do not separate, that form no barrier.

June […]3.

... this poetry of thoughts.

Friday, June 17.

(Versailles.) It is the color of painted objects, though not of real objects. And I maintain that it ought not to be the same on canvas as in the world. There is a change in the atmosphere, there is one in the base. And you wish there to be none in the figure. That would injure the harmony.

June […]8.

—One to illusions through reason, and the other to reason through illusions. And of two kinds of illusion, those of imagination and those of feeling. He is a retiarius.

That is to wander beyond, not beyond reason, but beyond the work.

June […]0.

Tea. Its perfume in its flavor, perceptible to taste even more than to smell.

T37.Stirring about renders remuement, retaining physical movement in the contrast with attention. Fine keeps délié available to the impossibility of touching the point; the image is not reduced to an abstract distinction.

T38.Truth is carried forward as her, preserving the personification. The desire and the opportunity remain separate complements of could not resist. The source prints singular nom with plural donnés; English cannot reproduce that agreement anomaly, which remains visible in French.

T39.The masculine le follows feminine circonstance in the printed French. English it preserves the referent without manufacturing an English gender disagreement. Admitting something into an account is distinguished from making it an article of belief; the circumstance is only little proved, not declared false.

T40.Period denotes the rounded rhetorical sentence, not a historical era or punctuation mark. The Italian campo vaccino means cattle field and was a name for the area of the Roman Forum when used for cattle. The final Today campo vaccino remains a fragment: its relation to the vanished eloquence is suggested, not completed in the main text.

T41.The opening In the etc. remains incomplete. Échellons gives successive steps or rungs; enfilade gives a series in one line, as with connected rooms. The 1798 Académie dictionary also applies enfilade to a sequence of phrases. The English keeps the contrasting spatial arrangements without supplying the missing subject matter.

T42.Atmosphere, base, and figure remain distinct. Harmony renders assortiment as the fitting of parts to their changed surroundings. The sentence beginning And you wish retains the source’s period, not an added question mark.

T43.Prestiges means illusions or enchantments, not social prestige. Both the missing verb in the opening contrast and the unnamed He remain. A retiarius was a gladiator who fought with a net; the term preserves Joubert’s unexpected image of ensnaring.

T44.Extravaguer is given its spatial force through wander beyond. The sentence displaces the apparent charge of unreason into a charge of straying outside the work, without supplying an example.

T45.The fragment locates perfume in flavor and makes it perceptible to taste even more than smell. It does not collapse the two senses or add a claim about the chemistry of tea.