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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1804

Ecclesiastes is made for the bilious; and the other for the peaceable. The different temperaments of minds need wisdom and truth differently seasoned.

Nota. the difference in Bossuet’s style when he writes in Latin or in French. In the first case he uses ready-made expressions and turns of phrase. It is no longer he who speaks, it is Latin. In the second, he makes his language, it is molded to him, he creates it.

To wish to dispense with what is necessary, to wish to use what is useless: sources of ills in composition.

January 19.

Pratenses; or: thoughts that come in the meadows.

That is to say, I know well in prose what I want to say, but I do not know it in verse. I know it in matter, but not in turn of phrase. I do not know it molded; or: I can give it in a description, but not show it in a picture.

— and at once an extreme vivacity, an extreme circumspection: it is difficult to keep these in harmony. Nature carries one there in a leap; but the weight...

Perfection. One reaches it, but to stay there! That is what is painful.

January 20.

The eye always turned upon itself: folly of the mind.

Virgil. Aeneid, last books. — And the verses in them are less firmly nailed down. Did he not himself say “tear a verse from Homer”?

I have to mold my phrases; and that is the most difficult part.

An exact measure of what memory needs to find in each stroke a sound easy to retain, and a supreme distinctness.

But meaning must fit meaning perfectly, and the more or less confined extent of the thoughts must cast variety into the uniformity of rhythm. Like a stream whose waves have the same breadth and are always renewed. The idea of this change and the sight of its movement remove all sense of its monotony.

T154.Bilious retains the temperamental and bodily coloring of bilieux. The other remains unnamed; no second biblical book is identified. The culinary image of differently seasoned wisdom and truth is preserved.

T155.The Latin Nota remains as in the earlier entry. The contrast is between inherited Latin expressions and a French language Bossuet makes for himself; molded to him preserves the physical image.

T156.The Latin plural means growing or found in meadows. Joubert’s following phrase provides his own application to thoughts; the Latin is retained as part of that play.

T157.Matière, tournure and moulé distinguish material, verbal shaping and a molded form. Signalement is a description by identifying features, contrasted with an actual picture; no literal portrait of a named person is supplied.

T158.The weight that interrupts nature’s leap remains unspecified, and the ellipsis is not completed. Vivacity and circumspection both retain the repeated extreme.

T159.Cloués retains the physical image of verses fixed by nails. The Aeneid is named in English in its usual form; the French retains the edition’s Œneide. The question attributes a saying to Virgil without supplying a source for it.

T160.Trait is rendered as stroke, retaining the overlap between a concise verbal feature and a mark that paints. Distinctness continues the earlier distinction between netteté and transparency.

T161.Étendue and resserrée retain the contrast between extent and confinement. Thought’s varying extent sets variety within a uniform rhythm; the stream’s repeated waves remain the image rather than an explanation of a particular meter.