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— Indeed, in this season, day has all its parts, as does night. All is day in the long days of summer, and the sun, as it rises, seems to touch its noon. In the long days of winter, all is evening or half-light.
Voices have imitated instruments (or birds).
September 2.
The metaphysician says “the soul, the body” etc. But the moralist says “man.” He takes him, so to speak, fully formed, and without distinguishing parts or faculties.
September 1.
“The soul (some ancients said) is mingled with the body.”
September 2.
“The soul mingled with the body.” And the body would leave the soul only when it had become unfit to teach it anything, incapable of serving it. But — on the contrary; — then the soul leaves the body. It has received the command to do so and, withdrawing little by little or all at once, leaves the body’s parts or the whole without functions, without preservation.
Whole in its whole and in every point. Its presence there makes life.
The first system shows us only a machine; the second brings more into view a divine work, a being. The essence of a machine is matter. Its author is never more than a man. But the essence of a being is always spirit, and God is always its author.
September 3.
But on the contrary nothing is so simple and so little marvelous (I mean so little marvelous in its apparatus). Sublime virtue is only extreme goodness, and genius is only extreme good sense applied to things that are outside the world in nature or outside customary use in human ingenuity. To speak of them grandiloquently is to know them little. All scaffolding (sic) masks them and risks making them misunderstood.
Sunday, September 4.
English gardens. Whether the love of these irregularities and the horror of symmetry do not arise from a certain disturbance of mind.
In music; we are the instrument it plays, but an animated instrument that feels itself, hears itself, and finds pleasure or discontent according to whether it is well or badly touched. This music sometimes tangles our strings, or stretches them too tightly, or loosens them too much, and can thus disorganize us.
— We are an instrument it plays. There is something of the muse in that.
September […].
The false features, no longer our own, that we sometimes receive from old age.
September […].
... and little space on the paper, as they occupy little in the mind once they have been purified. I ask you for an idea of them, not an enumeration. Detach their pure image.
— and an indefinable something painful that betrays the labor of birth. The labor of a thought reduced to pushing others aside and making an opening for itself in order to come forth.
... all ending in some idea that has a kind of resonance. It takes this character from the prospect it opens and the emotion it causes, like sound. All those that echo on the instrument produce this double effect on our soul, making it feel both space and measure, space as novelty, measure as order, arrangement, action, and regularity.
Like a solo followed by an orchestra.
Ignorant people who know only your harpsichords and your organs! I play the ancient lyre, the lyre of three or five strings, the lyre of Orpheus, not that of Timotheus. I play the harp or the bassoon when they accompany the voice. Instruments (if I must tell you) that give as much pleasure to the one who holds them as to those who watch them; for he hears himself, judges himself, is held within his tune, is forced to listen to himself. He charms himself and does not receive all his pleasure from the applause indispensable to your noisy concerts, like an accompaniment without which the number of their multiplied chords would not be complete.