Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

September 23.

Sometimes the mind likes to make itself mists, obscurities, in which it sinks, in which it loses itself.

The nascent and new idea expresses itself differently from the idea that has long preceded its expression. The first is more graduated.

September 24 (ill).

In the fine arts, the true is the subject that receives the beautiful, and the only subject (substratum) that can make it stand out.

In the fine arts, the true is matter and the beautiful is form. The exact true makes one believe that the beautiful is true.

September 29.

One painted (at first) what one could not see. One sang what one wished to make heard by what was far away. Without the idea of the invisible and the inaccessible, men would have invented neither music nor painting.

October […]2.

The word “echo” in painting and in coloring.

October […]3.

Quickness and lightness of mind are one of the characteristics of this century. Our judgments and our style bear their effects. A certain effervescence.

God as an old man, impropriety.

October […]5.

Beyond appraisal, like the qualities of the heart, which have something infinite about them. Those of the mind can easily be counted, appraised.

The Apollo Belvedere. There is no more beautiful statue, but there are statues with a more beautiful expression. Or, if you wish, it is the most beautiful of statues, but not the most beautiful of works.

October […]8.

Gold is the sun of metals.

October […].

Our minds are sick from being too full, from being too full of useless knowledge.

October 11.

And perhaps one never speaks so well as when one does not know perfectly what one is going to say.

Indeed, what is needed in the arts is not truth, but illusion. Yet to produce illusion, a certain truth is needed.

T203.Graduée retains an unfolding by degrees, without replacing it by clearer or more developed. The grammatical subject remains the first idea; the sentence is not silently rewritten with its expression as the subject.

T204.The true and the beautiful remain nominal terms. Subject keeps sujet in its sense of something that receives form, as Joubert’s parenthetical substratum clarifies; it is not confined to a painting’s topic. The word substratum remains roman as printed.

T205.The compressed nominal le vrai exact is retained, followed by true as a predicate of the beautiful. The English does not merge these uses into a general statement that realistic detail makes art convincing.

T206.The source uses ce qui, not a named listener or deity. What was far away is retained despite its unusual application to hearing. The counterfactual claim about inventing music and painting remains Joubert’s, with the invisible and the inaccessible distinct.

T207.The entry is a nominal fragment about the term echo. Coloring follows American spelling and retains coloris as the use or effect of color, without inventing a particular painting.

T208.The terse nominal judgment remains without a supplied verb or an added painter. The French retains the printed spelling veillard.

T209.Inapréciable is beyond assessment or valuation here, not imperceptible. Repeating appraised keeps the link to s’aprécier in the contrast with qualities that can be counted.

T210.Trop plein is repeated, and the physical excess of fullness remains the cause of the mind’s sickness. The English does not replace the image with a diagnosis or the modern label information overload.

T448.The day is heavily obscured by the gutter. Its ink trace does not securely establish a full digit; no date is reconstructed from sequence.