Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

[Malebranche.]

One cannot paint it better than through breath, which is something that comes from the heart.

Heaven has given us images of them, portraits, in default of the realities... And we reject these images.

What are you saying? God perhaps used fire and water to create the earth.

(Deambul.) Matter cannot exist without God. As nails cannot exist without fingers, nor hair be produced outside the head.

Sounds proving that everything is still in a molten state (at least internally, etc...) “In a state of flow,” Plato used to say.

December 24.

Epic subjects are lacking rather than poets. (That is to say, I think, sooner.)

Manner, from mania. If it is involuntary, it is a tic. If it is natural, it is called originality. If it comes from choice and practice, from contrivance, it is jargon, charlatanism.

No man ever had as much as Voltaire of what we call manner. He has it everywhere in his letters, above all in his long lines of verse, much less in his histories. In his letters: “I imagine that your poem will be filled with a sublime philosophy. The age has risen to that pitch. You have contributed no little to it...” In his long lines of verse, etc.

His words of manner were: world, globe, sublime, brilliant, philosophy, philosophical, the human race, etc. His postures of manner were the capriole, the burst of voice. And observe that there are in him not only manners of style, but also manners of mind. All of them, in him, consist in evasion.

One has manner only in padding.

Extravagance busy giving laws, and error preaching madness.

To two fools who play the capable men. One is a bilious fool, the other a phlegmatic fool. [They] have the air of saying to themselves: I am sufficient.

“We more readily admit (as St Lambert very aptly said) the marvelous in species than the extraordinary in events.” Indeed, the nature of the human mind is made that way. Outside the world, the imagination pictures and man believes whatever one wishes. There is empty space there in which to place illusions.

There are labors that corrupt, but idleness does so more.

T29.The italic souffle is breath. Its source in the heart remains Joubert’s image, rather than a physiological explanation. The object le is rendered it without a supplied identification.

T30.Images and portraits remain separate nouns. The unspecified them follows en; the source does not identify which realities are absent. The repeated images makes the final rejection explicit.

T31.The abbreviated Latin walking notation remains in its original body position and italics, without being expanded into an invented place or date. The separate As sentence keeps the nail/finger and hair/head comparisons.

T293.Deambul. remains an unexpanded abbreviated walking circumstance in the body.

T32.Proving remains a participle rather than a complete assertion with a finite verb. Fusion repeats the material melting image on page 472, and écoulement is flow. The saying remains attributed to Plato as Joubert reports it; no exact dialogue passage is asserted.

T33.Joubert writes plutôt, then explicitly glosses it with the separately written plus tôt. Rather and sooner retain that visible correction in sense, instead of absorbing the parenthesis into the first sentence. The issue is the earlier exhaustion of epic subjects, as his parenthesis suggests.

T34.The English keeps manner through this sequence because manière ranges from an individual style to affected mannerism. Joubert’s association of manière with manie is a word association in the text, not an independently asserted etymology. The final industrie denotes deliberate contrivance. The Académie’s 1798 entry records both characteristic artistic style and affectation.

T35.Grands vers denotes the longer form of verse, conventionally the French alexandrine, rather than a judgment that the verses are great. Long lines of verse preserves the contrast with the letters and histories. The age rising to a pitch keeps the musical metaphor. The quoted letter remains as Joubert gives it.

T36.Capriole retains the name of a leap or caper. The burst of voice and manners of mind extend the physical and vocal image into thought. Evasion renders esquiver without specifying what Voltaire avoids; the same verb returns on the next page.

T37.Remplissage is filler or padding in a work. Manner here has the unfavorable sense of mannerism; the abrupt generalization remains as printed.

T38.Bilious and phlegmatic retain the older temperament vocabulary. The opening To two fools has no supplied governing sentence. The final French Ont is third-person plural: [They] supplies its omitted subject so that English have cannot be mistaken for an imperative. Each fool appears to say I am sufficient; the singular je is not changed to a collective we.

T39.Espèces is retained as species or kinds of beings, distinguished from events. The marvelous can find room beyond the known world. The empty space and placing of illusions remain spatial images, without substituting a psychological explanation.