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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1783

No individual date printed

By an instinct worthy of wonder, there is nothing these sorts of girls spare to give themselves an idle air, a delicate air, and an adorned air.

Idleness prepares one remarkably for sensual delight; delicacy of manner or body presupposes its practice, and adornment the desire for it.

But what discernment in everything must be needed in so coarse a class to divine all this!

They also like to give themselves a childlike air because it presupposes freedom from every care.

No individual date printed

Picture people shut inside a machine, where they smash and break everything it contains, but who otherwise keep careful watch... keep it away from anything that might strike and destroy it.

This is the image of most ministers. They trifle with the state’s inner happiness, but otherwise they omit nothing that may serve its preservation and even its political splendor. They find themselves comfortable in this machine and would be sorry to see it damaged; for the rest, it matters little to them whether their companions find themselves well or ill at ease in it. That is not their business, or at least not their concern...

[1783?]

It is not a matter of indifference whether one sees a woman in town or in the country, in the morning or in the evening, in sunshine or in rain, by torchlight or by daylight.

— It is a natural thing for men to gather as night approaches.

No individual date printed

Almost always the chorus (that is to say, the public) is composed of old men; it was they who directed public affairs, they who took care of the homeland, they from whom counsels and resolutions came, things suited to their experience, their age, their talents, and their tastes.

S3.Source editor’s annotationThe following three paragraphs are on undated leaves, but they contain copies in Joubert’s hand of several passages from The Last Adventure of a Forty-Five-Year-Old Man. Restif de la Bretonne’s novel appeared in 1783. I suppose that Joubert read it that same year. To the fragments he copies, Joubert adds only the following reflections: “It is a matter of complete indifference by what means one wins a heart (he says again [and, above: ‘says the philosopher Rétif’]), provided it really is won. That is not true.” Then: “Have you seen [writes Restif] in the villages the widows bruise their breasts and tear their hair over the grave of a husband whom death takes from them in the flower of his years, in the vigor of his prime, at the height of his affairs? They do not believe they dishonor their attachment and grief by placing self-interest among the principal motives for their tears and despair. Poor children! Who will feed us! I have lost my prop, my support, the one who gave us bread and made my household prosper... He was so hardworking, so thrifty! They would blush to say: I loved him, or he loved me so much! [And Joubert:] It is that in these classes what you call self-interest sometimes has motives as noble as the noblest disinterestedness.

T19.The facsimile prints sagacité de tout. Discernment in everything provisionally retains that difficult reading. Goût would yield discernment of taste, but that is a conjecture and has not been adopted. In the source apparatus, the italic extracts are Restif’s words copied by Joubert. The roman responses That is not true and It is that in these classes... are Joubert’s own. The source’s irregular quotation marks are retained; typography and this note preserve the attribution boundaries.

S1.Source editor’s annotationAll this on a separate leaf. This too, but crossed out by Joubert: “Precision in terms always marks the differences between objects. — N. B. I want to try for a time to carry into the perceptible world the strict language used in the language of the inanimate. For example: defectus solis varios lunaeque labores. Instead of translating ‘the sun’s fainting fits and the moon’s periodic indispositions,’ I would translate: the obscurations of the sun and the various changes that occur in the moon.”

T20.The first paragraph’s ellipsis and broken syntax are printed. The source note preserves an additional canceled passage by Joubert; it remains in the separate bilingual apparatus. That passage really prints langage ... langage inanimé. Its doubled wording is retained, with monde sensible rendered perceptible world. The untranslated Latin phrase is reproduced as Joubert cites it; his contrasting French translations are both newly translated into English.

S2.Source editor’s annotation“(in July 1783).”

T21.The heading is [1783?], whereas the source note reports (en juillet 1783). Both records remain visible and the structured full date remains null. A more precise inscription in the apparatus does not silently replace the uncertain heading.