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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1794

A doctrine worked out...

Grand words. Occupy the attention too much.

Ambition. Makes one serve well. Only those are good servants who like to govern their master, to influence his happiness, his pleasures, his well-being, while always remaining subject to him.

November 30.

Eye — is the sun of the face.

Words are oracles. How. And the oracles of chance.

That temperance is a civic virtue. — In that it diminishes the store of provisions little.

The hermit’s life. Why the idea pleases.

December.

The sieve of oblivion. Or the riddle of oblivion.

Or: Memory and oblivion are the mother and father of the muses. True knowledge is composed of these two things. Or: she holds a riddle in her hand. This riddle is called oblivion.

Genius. — Men have given this name to a kind of mind more sublime than all the others...

December 7.

Architect and mason. Matter and form.

Sound is to wind what flame is to heat.

December 8.

The soul paints itself in our machines.

Nurses’ knowledge is the art of their speech.

Tragedy and marionettes. The threads. The delicate springs. The strings.

T5.Temperance renders sobriété here, including moderation in eating, as the reference to the store of provisions indicates.

T4.Riddle here means a coarse sieve. It distinguishes crible from tamis, translated sieve; it does not mean an enigma. The same tool recurs in the following paragraph.

S2.Source editor’s annotationThen: “Bodies with springs or elastic bodies. ‘God created nature; nature created the world.’ (Castel.) ‘Those are the springs of this style’: that is very well said. ‘... Come, let us drink this bitter chalice to the health of the R. I. C. and die.’ (The Corsicans in 1797.) Note. Fire has no weight. (See the passage.) ‘Farewell, fair flower of Italy, transplanted to the land of giant grenadiers; return, mingle with the forests of laurels that the Apollo of warriors makes grow in these places. What land would not be embellished by you!’ (Volt. to Algarotti.)”

T8.The source annotation prints 1797 for the Corsicans even though it occurs within the 1794 section. The year and the unexpanded initials R. I. C. are retained as printed.

T6.Nourrices refers to women who nurse children. The bodily image is also explicit in Joubert’s injunction that minds be nursed at the breast.