Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1804

January 5.

A poetic vapor, a cloud, that resolves itself into prose.

There are forms of thought and forms of phrase. The latter, when they are all there is, make inferior writers. Even among the former, one must distinguish between those that come from memory and those that come from the soul. These last make excellent writers.

But something metrical.

(At Le Clos.) These ills are the health of the soul.

(On the road.) The riches of diction. But, if there are deeper riches and one must dig.

January 6.

Hebrews. Poetry so magnificent cannot have existed without power, without greatness, without prosperity.

January 7. (First cold.)

Nota. that Virgil has his verses, and Tasso has his stanzas.

January 8.

And in writings, everything must paint the state of the soul or the state of things.

Voltaire. The abundant sources of laughter.

Taste is a quality that is acquired, that is lost, that is altered, and that is recovered, restored.

Tacitus. He paints and watches himself paint. He reasons about his subject, his work, and his own operation, which he performed without reasoning.

On the compartmental mind (Desardillers’s expression) and that memory loves them.

T132.Résoudre retains the image of a vapor or cloud passing into another form. Resolves itself leaves the physical and compositional senses together rather than replacing the image with a completed poem.

T133.The latter refers to forms of phrase, the former to forms of thought. The final distinction, within forms of thought, is between those from memory and those from the soul. These last therefore refers to those from the soul.

T134.The fragment asks for a metrical quality without supplying a complete proposition or identifying a particular meter.

T135.Élocution concerns verbal expression, not solely public speaking. The following if clause has no completed consequence; the digging image and final period remain.

T136.The claim about poetry and national power belongs to Joubert. The English preserves its strong retrospective modality without independently endorsing the historical inference.

T137.The Latin imperative, note, remains in the text, followed by the printed full stop and the incomplete that clause. Verses and stanzas retain the different units attributed to Virgil and Tasso.

S1.Source editor’s annotationSame date: “No reputation except among the celebrated.” It is a scrap of a sentence from the eulogy of Mme de Beaumont.

T138.Beaunier quotes only a scrap from the eulogy of Mme de Beaumont. The condition except among the celebrated remains without an explanation of what kind of reputation is meant.

T139.The final without reasoning qualifies the operation already performed. The English retains the contrast with the subsequent reasoning about that operation.

T140.Esprit de compartiment is rendered as compartmental mind. The plural them remains after the singular French compartiment; it suggests compartments without adding that noun to Joubert’s fragment. The name follows the edition’s Desardillers.

T376.An isolated view of the facsimile confirms the printed name Desardillers, with no i after the double l; it is not silently normalized to Desardilliers. The plural les follows singular compartiment in the source fragment.