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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

December 8.

It is the animal part that is grave when it grows old. Yes. But practice is grave too, and we do indeed say grave exactitude. That is true. Yet theory also refreshes; the soul grows cheerful and young again in it, in the joys of intelligence.

That the mind grows young again, and that those marvelous liquors of which the peoples of the East speak, which transformed old men into handsome youths, hold true for the soul that rises to the sources of being and takes their coloring. Fountains of true youth. Imagination displaced you, but did not invent you! It only divined you obscurely!

This prose is ambergris that has dwelt with the rose.

December 9.

Friendships whose ashes must be respected.

December 10.

His extremities are mad. But within and at the center all is reason and goodness.

December 12.

Those people make flayed figures. It is the flayed figure of their thoughts. The muscle must be felt; but...

Movement must have grace, thought must have bloom; tone, sincerity; the hand, play. And intention? and intention, equity. As judgments, uprightness.

The heart is to the soul what sex is to the body: it is the organ of its love.

— if there are no new errors, but only errors more favored in one century than in another.

As crimes have multiplied laws, errors have multiplied explanations.

November 29.

I do not like that wretched Lucian, who mocked the religion of his country and his time.

November 3.

What makes a country a country, and a people a people apart.

Despite conquest, Persia has always been and will always be, in the long run, a separate and independent state. Greece has never been able to be one.

Like those streams that, starting from common sources, divide and flow through such countries that their waters can never rejoin and unite in a single lake...

Of continuity. It forms in two ways: through level ground which, though always interrupted, begins again without cease in certain lands; and through aggregation, which presents perpetual inequalities perpetually, indissolubly linked to one another, as in Switzerland. Switzerland is a block of granite and ice. Italy is cut in two. France has its warts, but it has only one visage and presents only a single face.

How it is not possible for Germany to have only a single face, or for Russia to have several. As for these British Isles, they will always reunite, unless none of them is strong. It is the fate of what is small to be invaded by what is larger as soon as the latter touches it. What neighbors another land must form part of it or be its subject.

T249.Grave is repeated for the animal part, practice, and exactitude, preserving its weight and seriousness against the refreshment and renewed youth attributed to theory. The brief assent and qualification remain separate sentences.

T250.The opening That retains the fragmentary Que. S’en teint carries a coloring or dyeing image, and you addresses the fountains of youth. Joubert says imagination displaced the fountains and divined them obscurely; it did not invent them.

T473.The opening Que has no supplied governing clause. The source prints s’en teint and addresses the feminine fountains without inserting a new referent.

T251.Ambre can mean amber or ambergris. The 1798 Académie dictionary distinguishes the fragrant ambre gris from yellow amber. Ambergris is an interpretive choice prompted by dwelling with the rose; the French does not include gris.

T252.The unnamed man’s extremities are mad while his interior remains reasonable and good. The bodily image is kept without deciding whether it refers to behavior, opinions, or physical manner.

T253.Écorché is the anatomical figure displayed without skin to expose its muscles. Joubert transfers that image to thoughts. The final but… leaves the necessary qualification unfinished.

T254.Fleur remains bloom, and jeu remains play, retaining the images of growth and freedom of movement. After the first two clauses, the French omits repeated verbs. Equity belongs to intention, and uprightness to judgments.

T255.Sexe is anatomical here: the sexual organ or organs. The analogy makes the heart the soul’s organ of love as sex is the body’s. The compressed English sex retains the single noun; it is not a statement about gender.

T256.The lower-case if and opening dash remain. The fragment asks or supposes whether errors themselves are new, as distinct from their favor in different centuries, without providing a conclusion.

T476.The lower-case conditional fragment is retained without a supplied conclusion.

T257.Lucien is rendered by the usual English name Lucian. November 29 follows December entries in the edition; the subsequent block is dated November 3. Both remain in the printed order.

T258.The five paragraphs remain one dated entry. Joubert’s assertions about Persia, Greece, and the later countries are translated as his claims, with their original modality and without treating them as independently established historical facts.

T478.All five paragraphs belong to the same dated block. Printed plein pied is not normalized to plain-pied; Iles has a capital I without circumflex; subject retains c. Historical/geographical claims and the difficult à moins qu’aucune... ne clause are preserved without correction.

T259.Plein pied is retained in French as printed and rendered level ground in the geographical comparison. The repeated always and perpetually belong to the argument. Visage and face retain the source’s two different words for France’s single aspect.

T260.The translation reads à moins qu’aucune d’elles ne soit forte as unless none of them is strong, taking aucune… ne negatively. This fits the following statement that the larger absorbs the smaller. A positive reading of aucune as any, with expletive ne after à moins que, would instead yield unless one of them is strong. The French does not settle that choice beyond doubt. The preceding impossibility is read as applying to both Germany’s single face and Russia’s several faces.