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 […]3. (Mildness of the weather.)

The nun and her complexion; and how piety makes one live.

“In departing from nature,” they repeat incessantly. Ah! say rather: in departing from one’s duties.

January […]4.

— Every word there comes from an idea that, in dissipating, has left nothing of itself but this remnant, but this vestige.

The Hebrews alone had an invisible god. Among them there was a footstool for the Lord’s feet; but they thought those feet could not be seen.

January […]5. (The thermometer at eleven degrees.)

The colors of prose and its openings of the mouth.

January […]6.

Such a style is possible only for those who have such thoughts, such subjects, such a talent.

It is not easy to understand oneself, as Fontenelle intimated when he said of himself: “I have always tried to understand myself.” And it is above all in what is movement on the soul’s part that it is difficult to know precisely what one means. One then has to paint something that is truly moving. If one has not caught it all at once, one must return to it several times.

[—] was telling me that I wanted to use all thoughts and dispense with all words. The observation is just.

The grass that sprouts moves the earth and leaves traces of this movement around its root. Look at the meadows.

January 17.

Memory and rhythm.

January 18.

To respect death. The death of others, one’s own. It is a serious thing, which must be done with reflection and which one must think about while doing it.

It is a key; whether it is gold or iron, what does it matter? it is fit to open.

T146.Fait vivre remains broader than prolongs life or improves the complexion. The nun is not identified, and the sentence does not state a medical mechanism.

T147.The claim of uniqueness is Joubert’s. Lower-case god and capital Lord follow his contrast; no additional religious comparison is supplied.

T148.The bodily phrase ouvertures de bouche is preserved beside prose’s colors. It is not narrowed to introductory sentences. The accompanying thermometer reading names no scale, so no conversion is supplied.

T388.Only the terminal 5 is readable in the damaged day. The source date circumstance prints a without an accent.

T149.S’entendre is read reflexively as understanding oneself, not coming to an agreement with someone else. The moving object belongs to the soul’s movement; the English does not replace it by merely emotionally moving subject matter.

T390.The partly clipped right-edge continuations of Fontenelle, m’entendre and mouvement are joined from the surviving syllables. The printed conditional clause Si on ne l’a saisi has no pas supplied.

T150.The bracketed dash is supplied by the source edition and is retained. No name is inferred for the person who made the observation.

T151.The imperative directs attention to the meadows. It is not treated as a reference to a book or as an invented title.

T152.Joubert moves from respecting death to calling it a thing one does. The English preserves that unusual construction and its repeated it; it does not silently replace death with preparations for death or decide how the act of dying is to be understood.

T153.Here clef is the instrument that opens, unlike the musical clef earlier in the notebook. Its material is subordinate to its use. The lower-case continuation after the question mark follows the French.