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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On Voltaire.]

Plutarch. Ancient wisdom is all there.

Dough for poetry, for music, for painting.

Bacon says that religion “teaches us what we cannot know.” Very good.

September 23.

Whether it is good to teach children that there are... and pleasures that cause death.

So true it is that manners tame humors!

September 24.

Wholly absorbed in his poetry.

The body: the only house in which we can dwell near our friends and from which we can see the sun. And life: the only place where we can also...

Or better: this world is the only place... Life is the only condition, and our body the only dwelling in which we can...

September 25.

A well-pruned vine stock. Its beauty; transparency or color of the fruit, the cutwork of the leaves. Their yellowed green. A swelling of the middle brought about by binding the top. Harmony of the fruit, or the grape, of the foliage or the vine branch, with the stock and its support.

September 26.

It is useful that whenever a man dies the others should suffer some inconvenience from it. Leave them then...

And those whom a long old age has, as it were, purified of the body.

How many memories abolished! The last memory in which so many things and so many people still lived has gone out; oblivion is going to bury them, N, N, N and N, your names will no longer be mentioned. Soon there will no longer even be anyone who has heard of you.

“Who would be (says Empedocles) foolish enough to say that a man existed before he was born and will no longer exist after his death?” (Vid. Plutarq.) I say that there is a fine departure from symmetry here.

S1.Source editor’s annotationJoubert is reading Plutarch. (Perhaps he is preparing that preface to extracts from Plutarch, of which I have an undated text.)

T211.Dough retains the material image of pâte: something to be worked and formed. It is not replaced by the abstract raw material.

T212.The paradox between apprend and ne pouvons pas scavoir is retained. Joubert attributes the quotation to Bacon; no precise passage is supplied by the source here.

T213.Whether preserves the inquiry opened by s’il. The gap after there are and the following and remain; no missing class of pleasures or harms is supplied.

T214.Mœurs concerns acquired ways of behaving, while humeurs concerns temper or disposition, with its older bodily associations. Tame preserves domptent; the near rhyme of the French nouns has no exact English counterpart.

T215.The facsimile prints à with an accent, giving tout à the sense of complete absorption or occupation. It has not been changed to a, which would yield Everything has its poetry. The subject of the fragment is not named.

T216.Joubert revises his own terms in the next paragraph: the world becomes the place, life the condition, and the body the dwelling. Both versions and their unfinished endings are retained.

T217.The source’s sep is the vine stock. Cutwork preserves découpure as the patterned division of the leaves, and binding retains the physical cause assigned to the swelling. The alternatives fruit or grape and foliage or vine branch have not been collapsed.

T218.The closing injunction is unfinished. The translation does not specify what the survivors are to be left to do or suffer.

T219.Memory first names what is remembered and then the last remembering mind in which people and things still live. Its extinction is followed by burial in oblivion. The four N placeholders are not expanded into names.

T220.The reported saying contrasts existed before birth with will no longer exist after death. That asymmetry is printed in the source and commented on by Joubert; neither half has been silently reversed. Vid. Plutarq. means See Plutarch. A precise passage is not given here.

T472.The source’s contrasting existoit and n’existera plus are retained, without repairing its reported philosophical statement.