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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1804

Sunday, January 1.

The alexandrine style (in prose) and the style in stanzas. The latter has few models, almost none. But...

“The composite or the triumphal.” Indeed, diversity and magnificence must mingle with what is so public and exposed to all eyes, to all tastes. Elegance with what is private and made for the pleasure and admiration of a small circle.

The composite and the decomposite. This latter designation would be very clear for naming the “pell-mell.” And: on the decomposite or pell-mell style.

Then there enters languages an ease and a superabundance to which it becomes necessary, if one wishes to be a great writer, to oppose the difficulties, of sure taste, of considered choice. Where there is a torrent, one must place resistances.

When words teach nothing, that is, when they are no better suited than others to expressing a thought, when they have no necessary union with it, the mind or memory cannot resolve to retain them, or retains them with difficulty, because they are obliged to use a kind of violence to bind together things that tend to separate.

January […].

Before abstraction has become something the mind can represent to itself and even conceive, how much time it needs! How much habit! With how many retouchings this shadow must be strengthened!

January […]3.

Strength in the organization and weakness in the matter brought into play. Like an automaton whose springs were exquisite and whose wood was too thin or too soft.

Here I am; to paint me at my best.

To outlive one’s passions and not outlive one’s powers. Happy.

Distinctness, propriety of terms, clarity are the natural in thought. Transparency is its beauty.

It follows that to show itself natural, thought needs art, or at least it needs time. Feeling has no need of it: it is heat. The other is light.

Natural, or existing in nature. A natural thought is in this sense a thought that really exists in the mind, that one does not feign either to others or to oneself, but that one has and carries within oneself.

January 4.

Some declaim them to themselves, others recite them to themselves, and others sing them to themselves; some merely tell them to themselves, read them to themselves, or speak them to themselves.

...when the soul speaks alone, without the temper and the vapor that envelop it taking part, except from very far away.

Yes, to draw all these effects from the meaning of words as you draw them from sound; from their choice, as you from their multitude; from their very isolation, as you from their harmonies: wishing, however, that there should also be harmony among them, but a harmony of nature and fitness, not a harmony of artifice and mere mingling, of chaining together.

T121.The term from verse is explicitly applied to prose. The parenthesis and the distinction between alexandrines and stanzas remain; the final But is not completed.

T122.The quoted terms retain their architectural suggestion beside the preceding discussion of columns. Petit monde is read as a small circle in contrast to the public exposure to all eyes and tastes. No definite class or named group is supplied.

T362.The clipped continuations and initial letters of magnificence, yeux, plaisir, fort and ou are restored from surviving text. Décomposite and the fragment Et : du style remain as printed.

T123.Decomposite mirrors Joubert’s proposed décomposite rather than becoming decomposed. The source itself gives pell-mell as the meaning and carries the proposed word over to style.

T124.The comma after difficulties follows the source’s unusual break before the two specifying phrases. Resistances keeps the plural obstacles placed in a torrent, without replacing the image by an abstract recommendation of restraint.

T125.Abstraction must become something that can be represented; the shadow is strengthened through repeated retouchings. Neither the time nor the habit needed for that process is reduced to a single act of definition.

T365.The day is lost at the left margin and is not inferred. The clipped beginnings of puisse, que and ombre are restored. The lower-case que after the first exclamation mark is retained.

T126.Organization refers to the arrangement or working structure, set against weak material. The automaton’s springs and its wood remain separate. The next paragraph’s self-portrait is a qualification, to paint me at my best, not an unambiguous report of painting in progress.

T366.Only a terminal 3 is provisionally readable in the damaged day; no missing leading digit is supplied. The clipped beginnings of Comme and mince are restored. The semicolon before à me peindre is printed.

T127.Happy remains an isolated adjective. No subject is supplied, and the distinction between outliving passions and outliving powers is preserved.

T128.Propriété concerns the fitness or precision of words, not ownership. Distinctness, propriety, clarity and transparency remain different qualities. The next paragraph contrasts feeling’s heat with thought’s light; it after need may refer to art or time, and is left unsupplemented.

T129.The reflexive direction is repeated for all six actions. Them remains without a supplied noun; declaiming, reciting, singing, telling, reading and speaking are not collapsed into a single kind of inner speech.

T130.The source qualifies sans que by the later que de fort loin. The English preserves the distant participation of temper and vapor rather than making their exclusion absolute.

T131.Convenance concerns the fitness or accord of words. Industrie is read as deliberate artifice in contrast to nature; the concluding mingling and chaining together remain distinct. The repeated as you clauses retain Joubert’s abbreviated comparisons.