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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1804

May 29.

To make her more lovable (religion), he shows her as easy and always ready to prostitute herself to pleasure.

Indeed, the aim of poetry is not imitation, but completion, embellishment, or rather the arrangement fitted to move.

May 30.

One of the surest ways to kill a tree is to bare its foot and expose its roots. So with institutions. Those one wishes to preserve, one must not dig up their origin too much. Every beginning is small.

T48.Religion remains feminine in the personification. Easy carries the suggestion of yielding beside the explicit prostitution image; the unnamed he is not supplied with a definite identity.

T49.Completion, embellishment and arrangement remain alternatives, with the last offered as a refinement. Disposition is read in its compositional sense of arranging parts, illustrated for a poem and defined for rhetoric by the 1798 Académie dictionary. To move leaves the affected person unnamed; no audience or specific emotion is supplied.

T50.Déchausser means removing earth from the tree’s base or roots here. Bare its foot retains the bodily image and the repeated act of digging up. The political analogy is Joubert’s claim, not an added recommendation to conceal a particular institution’s history.