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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On Voltaire.]

... as long as our health makes noise, movement within us.

I find it hard to leave Paris because I must part from my friends; and hard to leave the country because then I must part from myself.

September […].

One must never push all one’s thought outside oneself (except those it is good to be rid of). One must always keep within oneself a portion of what the mind has produced so that it may feed on it. Leave this bee a little of its honey. Breathe out all your anger, but not your friendship; abuse and not praise. In a word, vomit your bile and keep your blood.

“Do not extinguish the spirit,”—and do not empty it either.

There is no noise where there is no hearing, no image where there are no eyes. Yet it seems to me that there may be light there. That is because we do indeed have this idea of light: that it can exist without participation. We even conceive of it as uncreated, perpetual, and eternal.

A perpetual sound would become unbearable to us, an image always the same would weary us. But a beautiful, gentle light, always even, might very well always please us equally.

This body had doubtless been given to me for only a short time.

— There I shall find a great many friends who have gone before me. I shall find more in heaven than I leave on earth....

Those whom heaven has endowed with more light have seen that it is so.

This is better painted than named. One must make a picture of it, not an identifying description. To make it known, it is indispensable to make it loved. Whoever speaks of it coldly cannot make himself understood. Here one knows through enthusiasm.

September […]9.

(Add to the entry There is no sound, above:)

I conceive that there would be colors, that is, certain arrangements of light, even if there were no eyes. But if there were no hearing, I do not conceive that there would be harmony: it is the mind that makes it. We conceive of brightnesses, but not colors, without atmosphere or matter. We conceive of harmony without the participation of air, between pure spirits. We do not conceive of flavors without bodies, but we can indeed conceive of contact, and smell too. There are, in our imagination, affections and perfumes for pure spirit, etc.

We must not believe that we can sincerely imagine of spirit what cannot befit it. We have a natural idea or feeling of it that does not allow us to conceive it clearly as we please.

Imagination: this eye. Objects that paint themselves in its pupil. True dolls.

Children, amuse themselves with appearances; too little proportioned in their first dimensions to the realities that interest them most.

Human mind. I seek its nature; others will learn its use.

Words in which one feels light, fitness for important applications; value, without knowing it exactly. And that memory stores it [only?] by instinct.

... [they] speak only from the head. Head voice, head mind, head opinions.

September 20.

Middle Ages. This spirit of quibbling was at least exercised only on words.

Bacon says that the imagination loves waters, “sheets of water,” to use his expression. That is because the image of these mirrors presents itself to the eyes and the memory entire and all at once. Because it is already made, because it enters easily, because it is easy to lodge, etc. Because one plunges into it and dreams of it while seeing it, etc. Because they offer the spiritual faculty an operation better proportioned to it.

Bossuet. Vehemence united with tranquility.

T189.The bodily disturbance is attributed to health as printed. No illness is substituted. The next paragraph remains in the same source entry, without an inferred causal connection.

T190.The singular all one’s thought followed by plural those preserves pensée followed by celles. The source then shifts from formal or plural imperatives to the singular familiar vomis and garde; English cannot mark this change in the imperative itself. The bee’s honey and the body’s bile and blood remain separate, successive images.

T191.The quotation recalls 1 Thessalonians 5:19. Joubert prints esprit in lowercase and adds an injunction against emptying it, connecting the biblical phrase to the preceding thought about retaining what the mind produces. The English keeps lowercase spirit and the two distinct physical verbs.

T192.Sans concours means without participation or cooperation; the text does not expressly name what would participate. The claim is not expanded into an account of perception. The repeated toujours and the relation between égale and également are retained in the next paragraph.

S1.Source editor’s annotation“There I shall find...” etc. erased by Joubert. There are a few more lines, but illegible because of the erasure.

T193.Beaunier transcribes these words while reporting their erasure by Joubert. They remain in the source order, with the cancellation explained in the separate source apparatus. No wording is supplied for the additional lines that Beaunier calls illegible.

T194.Signalement is an identifying description, here distinguished from a tableau that makes its subject loved. The object of cela is not supplied. Enthusiasm remains a way of knowing in Joubert’s sentence.

T195.The addition refers to entry jj-c1938-v1-p0403-e04, beginning Il n’y a pas de bruit. Joubert’s reference says son, sound, rather than bruit, noise; the difference is retained in the translated instruction.

T455.Only the final 9 of the day is visible; a preceding digit has not been inferred. The addition instruction is retained as its own printed paragraph. The source prints athmosphère. Several right-edge endings on page 404 are clipped and restored from surviving letters; à before notre guise is contextually restored at the clipped right edge.

T196.The repeated conceivable distinctions are retained without resolving them into a single theory: colors are initially allowed without eyes, then distinguished from brightness without matter; harmony is said to require mind but not air. Spirit renders esprit where it is considered apart from body, while mind renders its activity in making harmony. Affections retains the broad sense of ways in which spirit may be affected.

T197.Prunelle is the pupil of the eye; the objects appearing there are then called true dolls. The unusual image is not expanded into a theory of miniature representations. The following fragment’s feminine proportionnées grammatically points toward appearances, but the relation of their first dimensions to the children and the realities that interest them remains compressed and uncertain.

T198.Beaunier prints [ne?] in the construction ne... que, normally only. English places the doubt around [only?], because translating ne separately as not would reverse that construction’s sense. The singular it follows the source’s l’ after plural words, and the awkward opening And that is retained rather than silently completing the sentence.

T199.They is supplied in brackets for the finite plural parlent with no expressed subject. Head voice preserves voix de tête, a vocal term, and its repetition is extended to mind and opinions as in the French.

T200.Joubert attributes the expression to Bacon; no precise passage is identified here. The repeated because, the image’s lodging, and the plunge into it are retained. The final they follows the French shift from elle to elles, returning toward the waters or mirrors rather than regularizing every pronoun to image.