December 29.

(At Le Clos). Their hours of each day and their days of each week have a duty awaiting them.

The soul that speaks to God and speaks to itself. How it speaks to him, how it speaks to itself. It seeks to interest itself. The mind, when it speaks to itself, draws for itself only a simple plan and a measurement of each object. That is its sum total.

And God himself, how do men imagine he would speak to them? Would he use that language of the pure mind that would say nothing to their heart. It is a scholar’s language, but it is neither divine nor human. It is only learned. And on this subject, the Count de Milly’s 4 inches of calcareous earth. He was a chemist. That was the whole man for him.

What is called a motif in song. Another way of hearing it.

Attention is sustained (in verse) by the amusement of the ear. Prose has no such help. Could it have it? I am trying. But I think not.

December 30.

On applause. And that: “one always applauds what forms an antithesis, any clashing of thoughts or expressions.” Why this happens and how it depends on the one hand on the effects of the voice and on the other on the listeners’ immobility, on their desire and need to give signs of attention. Half attention is more lavish with these signs. When attention is captivated, it does not think of them.

Criticism “beating time for the muses” is polite, whatever Mr S. may say.

December 31.

Without difficulty, art would not exist. One wants a roof to be supported. Necessity calls for a pillar there. The craft would be content with a beam. But art places a column there. That column, it dreams of it; first, it rounds it. The craft would have squared it. It would have thought only of the need. But art concerns itself with pleasure, working not only for use but for honor and memory. — But let us take care. Columns require a pediment. Columns in a gable would surely be ridiculous? I want the beautiful. But is it needed everywhere?

(And the day before.) Mr Bertin. The window in Florence.

The reader’s disposition. Nothing alerts him to these measures. There is no stroke of the bow here, no prelude, etc. Like a song that is not notated and of which nothing gives warning.

“There are beautiful lines there.” And what those others called the pure mind. That is to say, the kind of attention and summing up that perceives and shows in each object only its lines or its lineaments, entirely pure, entirely dry, if the word were not so dry itself. (Glimpsed and to be observed. Nota.)

November 23, Wednesday.

Every body has its forebody. Every sense has its foresense. Tact is that of touch, modesty is a tact of the soul.

Every body has its forebody and every sense its foresense through a certain prolongation of its volatile matter or of the organization of its subtlest substance, which carries it outside itself and makes it be where it is not, act where it cannot reach. — Yet also susceptible to being moved by what is absent, if it falls within the sphere of its evaporations.

As the sea touches the moon by means of its vapors, and the sun touches the earth through the length of its rays — distances.