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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

Montesquieu. Forms suited to expressing oneself in few words, and the art of brevity.

August […]3.

Style of the Bible. The mind seems to have performed no operation there; no art makes itself felt. It is nature all alone and wholly pure.

August […]4.

Continuous style (or the didactic and uninterrupted succession of sentences and expressions) is natural only to the man who holds the pen and writes for others. Everything is a burst, everything is a break, in the soul. It understands itself at half a word.

August […]8.

God has placed in man not only love of self, but also love of others.

August 25.

All are false, you say? And I say, all are true.

Everything that occupies us with others cheers us; everything that occupies us with ourselves alone saddens us. Hence that melancholy, the feeling of the man who thinks only of himself, who is too shut up within himself.

August.

The human soul has four houses. And when life runs its full course, it inhabits in succession a child’s body, a young body, a man’s body, and an old man’s body. That is its last station, and it is short. Some, however, have had an old age longer than their other ages.

September 1.

Of historical truth. It matters to tell it, but it does not matter to possess it. Moral truth alone matters in moral things. Thus, moral truth in moral things, physical truth in physical things such as arts or trades, historical truth in matters of erudition.

September 2.

Plato wishes public squares (markets) to be consecrated to the gods who preside over good faith.

Sunday, September 9.

(M—r—c—) The head cold and agitated. In others, at least, it is the agitation of flame (which always has grace). But the agitation of ice, the heating of what is cold, the movement of what is heavy.

September 15. (At Villeneuve.)

Nature, and art which is a second nature. So that wherever they are together, there is more naturalness, a more beautiful naturalness.

September 18.

“Beautiful truths.” Teach us beautiful truths.

T193.The repetitive tout est and the nouns jet and coupure are retained as burst and break. The soul’s understanding itself at half a word remains the literal image of demi-mot, rather than an explanatory statement that it needs no language.

T194.The source supplies no noun for feminine toutes. No truths, religions, opinions, or other antecedent is silently inserted. The disagreement and the repeated all remain.

T195.Occupe des autres means occupying attention with other people, rather than keeping other people busy. The English supplies the necessary us, then follows the movement from others to oneself and confinement within oneself.

S2.Source editor’s annotationSeparate leaf, dated thus: “Wlle W[…] August 1804.” Now we have already had this thought in an incomplete form. Does Joubert take it up again in August 1804? That is quite possible. But I do not know whether he is at Villeneuve in August 1804: I believe him to be in Paris. Perhaps he made a mistake in writing the number of the year? There are examples of this error on his part. Thus, in the notebooks, where the sequence of dates is not in doubt, he writes “August 5, 1803” for “August 5, 1804.”

T196.The four houses and four bodily stages remain one paragraph. Station is retained as a stage or stopping place in the soul’s course. The source gives only August for this entry, and Beaunier separately questions the year of the dated leaf; no exact date is invented.

T197.The source annotation quotes an abbreviated place form beginning Wlle W, followed by a damaged raised glyph. That loss remains […] in both languages, and its raised position is recorded in the transcription metadata. Beaunier’s proposed locations and possible mistake in the year remain his qualified editorial reasoning, including his first-person I.

T436.A raised glyph after the second W is a damaged solid shape whose letter cannot be certified independently; […] marks that loss and the abbreviation is not expanded. Its raised position is recorded here.

S1.Source editor’s annotationNotebook. — The last date in this notebook is September 2, 1804; the following notebook begins on September 4. The last page of the first of these two notebooks contains a scribble, notes on book purchases: “Mr Vignon, rue Dauphine, near the museum. He offered me 16lt for the Spanish Don Quixote...” Etc. Joubert was therefore in Paris at the beginning of September. Then, in the following notebook: September 4, one page; September 9, one page; next: “September 15, Saturday, 1804 — at Villeneuve.” His departure from Villeneuve for Paris in 1804 must have taken place during the gap in the notebooks, February 23–April 16.

T198.The distinction between telling historical truth and possessing it remains as stated. The final sequence is nominal, without a supplied verb or a claim that one kind of truth is false.

T199.The quoted amount is retained as 16lt without conversion or expansion. For the Spanish Don Quixote follows du Don Quichotte espagnol without supplying a missing verb of purchase or sale. The notebook dates, locations, and inferred journey are Beaunier’s source apparatus, not dates assigned anew to Joubert’s entries.

T437.The retained amount is printed 16lt; it is not silently converted to a modern currency. The notebook and travel chronology is Beaunier’s inference, kept in the separate source apparatus.

S2.Source editor’s annotationSeparate leaf, dated.

T200.The parenthesis identifies the public squares as markets. Good faith retains bonne foi; no particular deity or passage of Plato is added to Joubert’s text.

T201.The abbreviation remains unexpanded. Flame, ice, heating, and heaviness retain the unusual physical contrasts, and the final But remains a fragment without an inserted assertion.

T202.Nature and naturel remain distinct terms: art is called a second nature, and their combination increases what is natural and its beauty. The source does not say merely that art resembles nature.

T439.A Villeneuve is printed with unaccented A; the location remains alongside its date.