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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[On Voltaire.]

December 22.

Aristotle maintained that anger was good for virtue and reason. He believed it indispensable to politics in wartime and to the government of the family in peacetime. “One must,” he said, “use it in war, not as a good captain, but as a brave soldier.” That, Father André said, was pleading the cause of human nature.

It even appears, from what Aristotle says of anger, that the Greeks were a naturally moderate and placable people. The Romans were much less so. The affair of the lamprey would never have happened in Athens, even had she been all-powerful. In everything, Aristotle is a thousand times more sensible and more a man of the world on this subject than Seneca, who speaks only as a declaimer and a man of the school.

This geometry of beauty (one does say line of beauty?) so well known to the ancients.

December 23.

The soul must touch there (at every point in a work).

They sometimes say, speaking of musical works, the air of..., the chorus of..., the overture of... Every work must also have its airs, its choruses, its overtures.

... sings for himself; and that is what one must not do, sing for oneself.

To have done with anger, it is not bad in the blood (and in the place where nature has put it). But it is worth nothing in the mind, where reason cannot endure it and where it is truly out of place.

December 24.

Legion of Honor. (literally) the distinction of not belonging to it.

December 25.

— who are willing to let their sorrow be glimpsed, but do not want its bounds to be seen.

The young girl’s death. “It is because God had need of her,” said good mother L-m-c. [Lemoce?]

December 26.

“That paints, but in the wrong direction, — arresting the mind on a point of description that is not in its place,” says Ch. D. very well (Mercure of Saturday, December 24, 1803). It is putting the background in the foreground.

December 28.

(In the hut.) When the soul speaks to itself and makes a spectacle of its own thoughts for itself, it clothes them in figures, it speaks to itself in images. It speaks in this way even to God. This language is truly intimate.

It seems to me that the pure mind and the language it speaks to itself is neither the soul nor its language. The pure mind that the Malebranchists have recommended again and again is only an extreme attention that strips what occupies it of its dough and its colors, to represent to itself nothing but the driest lineaments.

It is the art of neurology, the art of the camp planner, of the surveyor, the art of the mere maker of plans. The soul does not stop there. It paints everything for itself and paints it. The pure mind is only one of its helpers.

And let everything come from the entrails, everything down to the slightest expression. It is perhaps a disadvantage, but it is a necessity: I undergo it.

T94.Seneca reports Aristotle’s distinction between using anger as a soldier and using it as a commander in De ira I.9.2, then disputes it. Joubert’s wording and his reference to Father André remain as printed; they are not presented as a newly verified verbatim quotation from a surviving work of Aristotle.

T95.Placable means capable of being appeased, not placid. The lamprey alludes to the episode in Seneca, De ira III.40.2–4, in which Vedius Pollio orders an enslaved servant who broke a crystal vessel thrown to his fish, and Augustus intervenes. Seneca’s Latin has murenae; the English retains Joubert’s lamproye as lamprey. His counterfactual claim about Athens and his preference for Aristotle remain his own.

T96.The parenthetical question remains inside the nominal fragment. No specific theorist is named in the source, so none is inserted into the text.

T97.The musical forms and their repeated possessives are retained as a model for every kind of work. The three incomplete examples ending in of... remain unfinished.

T98.The source has no expressed subject for chante. The following chanter pour soi supports reading lui reflexively here; no singer is named.

T99.The nominal fragment presents nonmembership itself as a distinction. No omitted verb, award or personal biographical claim is supplied.

T346.The full stop after honneur and lowercase à and distinction remain as printed.

T100.The abbreviated name and the source editor’s questioned expansion remain distinct. The title mother does not by itself establish a religious office or a family relationship.

T347.The consonantal name L-m-c. remains unexpanded; the source edition’s conjectural [Lemoce?] is preserved with its question mark. An isolated view of the facsimile confirms a terminal c in L-m-c., not e; the source editor’s separate conjecture [Lemoce?] remains unchanged.

T101.The final sentence interprets fonds and avant spatially, continuing the metaphor of painting. The date inside the Mercure reference is a publication date, distinct from the notebook entry’s date. The abbreviated Ch. D. remains unexpanded.

T348.The date in the Mercure citation is bibliographical, not a replacement for the entry’s 26 décembre heading. Ch. D. and Xbre remain unexpanded. The beginnings of de and the continuation of Mercure on p. 423 are partly obscured and restored from the surviving text.

T102.The reflexive actions remain distinct: speaking to itself, presenting its thoughts to itself, clothing them in figures. Intimate keeps the inward character of the language without limiting it to speech addressed to another person.

T103.The singular is follows the source’s n’est after its compound subject. Pure mind renders esprit pur throughout this sequence; it is not equated with the soul. Dough retains the material pâte, paired with colors and contrasted with dry lineaments.

T104.Névrologie names the anatomical study of nerves in historical usage. Camp planner reads campeur in the older art of laying out or placing a camp, beside surveying and making plans. The soul’s repeated painting is kept distinct from these outline-making arts.

T105.The bodily entrailles is retained. The first-person necessity is something undergone, not a preference silently converted into a general rule for writers.