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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On Voltaire.]

For an expression to be beautiful, it must say more than is necessary while still saying precisely what is needed. Too much and enough must be joined in it, and there must be abundance and economy within it. The narrow and the vast, the little and the much must blend in it. Its sound must be brief and its sense infinite. Example: discentem credere opportet (Aristot.) Everything luminous has this character. A lamp and its wick at once perfectly illuminate the object to which they are applied and twenty others to which no one had thought of applying them.

Too much art is always around them (the rich or those who live in luxury, or surrounded by continual elegance).

“Who would wish to confide to a journal (says D[e]l[a]l[ot] gravely) the secret of a great thought?” This is Mascarille as a man of letters.

Indeed, clear ideas serve for speaking; but it is almost always for some confused idea that we act. They are what lead life.

October 10.

[Concerning Bossuet.] All great men have all believed themselves more or less inspired. All have at least believed they felt it.

And perhaps “non sine quodam afflatu divino dixerim.”

Virgil says it of bees. All honey has something celestial about it. “aerii mellis celestia dona exequar.”

In the fields of literature some (to speak as Plutarch does) “find in flowers only colors and scents, others find honey in them.”

Journals.—Only correctness, but correctness of style and thoughts.—Beware of harmony there.

Ideas—clear, confused. The first illuminate, but often the others warm. When both are good, there is only the difference between them that there is between flame and coals. Fire and truth are in the latter and in the former.

Any expression that has not grown old with us, to forbid oneself its use, at least in serious works. Etc. Words that were not born with us and that, so to speak, are not our age.

October 11.

... But there are no longer masters, only payers and the paid.

Voltaire. His temperament has served his works more than his reason and his learning.

Strength of mind, strength of head.—There are differences between these words. Whoever has a strong head has a strong mind. But not everyone who has a strong mind therefore has a strong head, that is, a head fit to sustain long attention without interruption or fatigue, without the head suffering from it or health being affected. In every strong head there is strength of health, at least in that part.

T242.Discentem credere opportet means The learner must believe. It recalls Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations, chapter 2, on the trust required of the learner in teaching. The source’s doubled p in opportet remains unchanged. The repeated oppositions of excess and sufficiency, narrowness and vastness, and brevity and infinity lead into the lamp’s illumination of more than its intended object.

T243.Art remains broad enough to include deliberate craftsmanship and artifice in luxurious surroundings. The centered separator in the facsimile makes this a distinct entry, not a continuation of the preceding lamp comparison.

T245.Mascarille is a theatrical figure associated with Molière; in Les Précieuses ridicules the servant adopts the airs of a marquis and a wit. Joubert applies that literary pretension to the remark he quotes. The editorial brackets within D[e]l[a]l[ot] are retained in both languages. Journal is left broad enough to name a periodical rather than assumed to be a private diary.

T246.Confused retains confuse as indistinct or not clearly articulated. The plural they follows the source’s shift from some confused idea to elles, with no added noun. The later flame-and-coals entry develops the difference between clarity and warmth.

T247.Concerning Bossuet translates the source editor’s bracketed context and remains inline. The repeated all in the first sentence is deliberate in the translation because tous occurs twice in the French.

T248.The Latin may be rendered I would say, not without some divine breath. Afflatus carries the image of breathing or inspiration. The quotation is retained in Latin; no author is assigned to it here.

T249.The Latin means I shall recount the celestial gifts of airy honey. It draws on Virgil, Georgics IV.1–2. The printed celestia and exequar remain rather than being normalized to caelestia and exsequar in the comparison text. Joubert omits the verse’s opening Protinus, and no omitted word is inserted into his quotation.

T250.Correction here is read as correctness of expression and thought, rather than the act of making editorial corrections. Harmony concerns the shaped sound and rhythm of prose. The compressed injunction is retained without an added explanation for avoiding it in journals.

T251.The final uns refers to coals and autre to flame. English latter and former preserve that reversed order of reference. Both fire and truth are attributed to both; neither kind of good idea is excluded.

T252.The source uses a reflexive infinitive, se l’interdire; the translation keeps to forbid oneself rather than making it a direct command. The birth and age of words remain personal images, not a rule supplied by the editor.

T500.The right edge clips au and avec, restored from surviving letters. The reflexive infinitive se l’interdire and the subsequent fragment are retained.

T253.The initial omission and the contrast among the three terms are retained. No particular trade, institution, or kind of master is identified in this fragment.

T254.Humeur concerns disposition or temper, not humorous wit alone. The contrast with reason and learning is retained without specifying which features of Voltaire’s temperament Joubert means.

T255.The repeated head remains physical as well as figurative: it can endure attention without injury to itself or to health. Strong mind is not translated as freethinker, a different sense of esprit fort that would obscure the distinction being made here.