Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

This globe is a drop of water; the world is a drop of air. Marble is thickened air.

Virgil’s mens agitat molem. God is the author of movement.

That indeed our particles are not even sounds, whereas among the ancients they were even notes; sometimes useless to the mind, they were never so to the ear. Whence it follows that, our languages being an instrument different from that of the ancients, we must work with their taste, but not with their manner.

December 1.

“God hates impudence,” the Egyptians used to say. Indeed, he is so much its enemy that it flees from us as soon as the thought of God enters us.

December 2.

Of those who feel God as rule, as light, and Of those who feel him as love.

Waves of light and sheets of brightness.

What does one do in metaphysics through a great discovery, if not understand perfectly the meaning of a word one used every day?

December […]4.

— And your name will keep his.

Invalidas tendens heu non sua palmas! (Virgil.) It was in connection with this line that Chateaubriand told me he had written that “there are certain beauties in poets that one can feel only through certain experiences.” Everyone has experienced it, but he alone knew how to say it.

December 6.

Of the heart, organ of the soul’s loves.

December 7.

Of Wanting to explain all that is by what one sees.

What are we all, even the old? Little children before God. Old age before eternity is only a dawn, the first instant of a morning. (The centenarian is only a child in God’s eyes.)

T240.Globe, world, and marble remain separate terms in this compressed speculation about matter. Thickened retains épaissi without supplying a modern physical explanation.

T241.The Latin phrase occurs in Virgil’s Aeneid VI.727 and means mind moves the mass. It remains embedded in Latin, followed by Joubert’s separate assertion about God and movement.

T242.Particles here are small grammatical words, not particles of matter. The opening That retains the uncompleted dependence of Qu’en effet. Joubert distinguishes audible sounds from musical notes and the ancients’ taste from their manner.

T468.The opening Qu’en is retained without supplying a governing sentence.

T243.The feminine elle refers to impudence, and y refers to us. The Egyptian saying remains as Joubert reports it, without an added attribution to a particular ancient work.

T244.The second capitalized Of preserves the repeated De. This order of rule, light, and love differs from the related fragment on page 467 and is retained.

T245.Le sien means the name belonging to an unspecified person or thing. His is an interpretive English choice; the masculine French possessive agrees with nom and does not establish the possessor’s gender. The damaged date remains partial.

T246.The printed Latin remains unchanged. The parallel in Virgil’s Georgics IV.498, in Eurydice’s farewell, reads invalidasque tibi tendens, heu non tua, palmas! Joubert’s quotation lacks -que and tibi and has non sua rather than non tua. The classical line pictures her stretching feeble hands toward Orpheus, no longer his; that sense is not silently imposed on the altered non sua. Chateaubriand’s remark remains Joubert’s reported conversation.

T247.Amours is plural. The nominal fragment makes the heart the organ of these loves without restricting them to a single kind of attachment.

T248.The capitalized nominal infinitive Vouloir remains Wanting. The fragment concerns explaining everything that is through what is seen; a governing verb is not supplied.