Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

Words suited to pleasing man. They are those in which he sees his heart.

... skimming everything and avoiding depth, he never breaks the ice, but no one has ever glided on it so well.

Glide; Glider; Voltaire.

Expressions must savor not of the country, but of the talent they come from. The taste of the soil is very good.

December 17.

Thus one gives an idea of divinity through adoration, of power through submission, and of merit through respect.

The people say that, in illness, health rests.

December 18.

As a ray pierces a cloud, and light the fog. Or — as a movement can penetrate an entire mass without any change taking place in it.

In sound, a trembling as of something liquid, in a molten state.

Things that demand more attention than is commonly given to what is said, must be written.

— At that age, the wonder of the human machine disappears; but that of the soul...

It is not so much the object as the impression it makes on us (in order to strengthen or regulate it) that music must paint.

December 20.

To lead the moral life instead of the animal life. — Civil life, poetic life. Affections and characteristics belonging to these four kinds of life. Add: intellective or purely contemplative life, religious or philosophical (confined to knowing).

For the subject must please, and all subjects are painful.

T8.The ice is part of the sustained surface-and-depth image. Breaks the ice is therefore literal within the metaphor, not merely the English expression for starting a social encounter. Glide and Glider in the next paragraph retain the related verb and noun; Voltaire is named only there.

T9.Sentent is given a sensory equivalent in savor, followed by the taste of the soil for goût du terroir. The apparent tension between rejecting the country’s stamp and valuing the soil’s taste remains. The source does not explain whether the latter soil is the writer’s individual talent.

T10.Health itself rests during illness in the saying attributed to the people. The English preserves this personification without converting it into a medical explanation.

T11.The opening As and the alternative Or — as remain fragments. The source does not state what is being compared to the ray, light, or movement. No change taking place in it refers to the mass.

T12.En fusion is read as a state of melting or being molten, alongside liquid and trembling; it does not refer to nuclear fusion. The nominal fragment gives no new verb or explanation of sound.

T13.What is said is contrasted with what must be written. The French ne after the comparison does not reverse the amount of attention. The comma between the long subject and its predicate follows the source.

T14.The repeated wonder belongs first to the bodily machine and then to the soul. The sentence stops before stating what happens to the soul’s wonder; no age or conclusion is supplied.

T15.The impression is the object of fortifier and régler, rendered strengthen and regulate. The parenthesis remains in its printed position, and painting is retained as music’s activity.

T16.Moral life is contrasted with animal life in Joubert’s division of inward and bodily experience; it need not mean simply virtuous conduct. The four kinds are moral, animal, civil, and poetic, followed by the added intellective or contemplative life. Intellective retains the technical adjective, and the parenthetical confined to knowing remains attached to the final formulation.

T17.The source gives no particular subject for this paradox. Painful retains pénibles, which can also suggest difficulty or effort; the apparent contradiction is not resolved by supplying a genre.