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A smoky fire.—And these words full of a fire that fills the air with smoke.
August 21.
The sun of minds and the mirror of all things. (See elsewhere.)
A work that smells of the sun, a work that smells of the candle.
The sonatas of Isocrates...
Resignation is a hundred times easier than courage, because it has a motive outside us and courage does not. If, then, both diminish our ills, let us use whichever diminishes them best. (Outside us, that is, outside our will.)
Necker. Public opinion. Must one follow it or subdue it?
August 22.
Must not the motive force be outside our will? The lever outside the weight?
Old nation, new government. New blood in old veins (or) young blood in an old body... The rejuvenation of Pelias.
Plato must be translated in a style that is pure but a little loose (a little trailing). His ideas are subtle (have little body). To clothe them, a veil suffices, a drapery (a cloud, a vapor), something floating that I cannot name. If one gives them tight clothes, one makes them all misshapen.
There are a host of common words that have only half a meaning (and are like half sounds). They are good only for circulating in chatter, like liards in trade. One must not display them by setting them into sentences when one declaims or writes. Above all, one must take care not to introduce them into verse. One would commit the same fault as a composer who admitted into his music sounds that are not (tones, tones that are not) notes.—Verse is indeed the music of the soul.
A work (must be a being and not an arbitrary thing; it) must have its proportions, its character, and its nature; an end, a beginning, a middle and accessories, a trunk, limbs, a stature—in brief, a personality.
Remember to sleep off your ink.
To give a new government to an old nation. One can impose it on the nation, but cannot give it. And in that case it is no longer a nation, but a people subjected by another people or by a few men.
Thorny trees (of equal strength) choke the others. (Our strawberry trees and the acacia.)
I must (he said) disguise my friendship as courtesy to cheer myself and amuse you.
August 26.
The moving path of the waters...
A river of air and light...
Sheets of clarity...
And it is from this point on earth that my soul will fly away.