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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume I

Reading language

YEAR 1786.

No individual date printed

“Must enjoy the brightness of the azure vault.” From these words one sees that he always looked at it with pleasure.

No individual date printed

Catherine. Auxerre. The coach. The teinturier. Name of a grape. Everyone gathers grapes and reaps as he sees fit.

It would be good for dramatic performances to be entirely public, if only to give the people an idea of a beautiful sound, a beautiful gesture, beautiful speech, and a beautiful voice...

Among any people that had neither towns nor general and regulated assemblies, there would be no public...

(Valprofonde, October 17.)

No individual date printed

If there is anything sad in the world, it is the poplar on the mountains...

No individual date printed

In sleep, the functions of life stop and are suspended. Animation pauses, and all the springs of the machine remain slack for a time through an imperceptible weariness that is one of the great means of our preservation...

No individual date printed

The pleasures of the great, when they are noisy and merry, are for the inhabitants of the countryside a spectacle that rouses them, gladdens them, exercises their minds, animates their conversations, and makes them find more joy in life...

No individual date printed

... For we do not know where we come from. It is certain only that all our ancestors crossed the Rhine.

We descend equally from the victors and the vanquished... The word gentil means foreigner.

The charm of painting lies in colors: a painter used to say that the rainbow is something one does not see often enough.

November 10, 1786.

Lantara never used more than one brush, which he wiped on his cheeks or his arm. He maintained that linen, in cleaning a brush, always left it clogged with the lint that came away, thus harming the purity and delicacy of the stroke. He also believed there was an advantage in using the same brush. It was that, always retaining some tint of the color just wiped away, it let the mixture show on the canvas and thus gave greater harmony to all the tones.

This painter, so exact and so great in landscape, understood nothing of figures, however. He could not have drawn an eye, etc...

December 6, 1786.

At supper at Durand’s. The painter Lantara. The use he made of his finger. Etc.

December 23, 1786.

Homer wrote to be sung, Sophocles to be declaimed, Herodotus to be recited, and Xenophon to be read. From these different intended uses of their works, a multitude of differences between their styles was bound to arise. Etc.

December 24, 1786.

Athenian bee...!

And you who so often sacrificed to the Graces, whose sculptor you were. If what is said of your youth is true, O wisest of the Greeks, you made them present in your discourses and visible in your slightest words, still more than they were in your sculptures!

A spirit of wisdom breathes out of these readings and penetrates the enraptured soul...

[1786.]

Every sound in music must have an echo; every figure must have a sky in painting; and we who sing with thoughts and paint with words, every phrase and each word in our writings should also have its horizon and its echo.

T22.Coche can mean a coach or a passenger boat. The terse Auxerre fragment does not decide between them; coach is provisional. Teinturier is retained as the grape name Joubert explicitly identifies, not translated as a person called the dyer.

S3.Source editor’s annotationValprofonde is a village a good league east of Villeneuve.

T23.The source editor supplies letters in aur[oit]. English uses the completed verb without brackets around unrelated English letters. The closing Valprofonde date is shown after the paired paragraphs as shared source metadata; it is not an additional English paragraph.

T24.Animation, the springs of the machine, and their slackening retain Joubert’s physiological model. The passage’s claims about suspended bodily functions are translated as written, without substitution of a modern account of sleep.

S1.Source editor’s annotationHere, a few notes on encaustic painting. I bring together in one chapter what Joubert wrote on it.

T25.Gentil is retained as the French word whose meaning Joubert states. The sentence records his etymological claim; it is not a claim about the modern English word gentle.

S2.Source editor’s annotationHere, notes on Cook. And I make a chapter of the Eulogy of Cook.

S3.Source editor’s annotationA leaf dated December 18, 1784 contains a few sentences copied from the first volume of Telemachus: “Make... the desert flourish. — Never... so sweet a flute... — As if men were not mortal enough! — Young men born of women who had forgotten their absent husbands... Youth born outside marriage (Tel., vol. I).N.B. Ibid. Long experience..... and the habit of work gave them broad views of all things. — November 18, 1784. — And who have not lived out their age.”

S1.Source editor’s annotationThis thought is undated. But it is on a leaf containing this note: “In the Journal de Paris, there are 41 letters per line in small type and 39 in large type; there are 52 lines per column.” These counts of letters (there is yet another) concern the Eulogy of Pigalle, which Joubert was thinking of inserting in the Journal de Paris; and the Eulogy of Pigalle is from 1786.

T26.The call to source note 1 on p. 63 follows sculptures! within the block headed December 24, 1786. The note nevertheless calls this phrase undated. Both the printed call location and Beaunier’s statement are preserved; their exact scope cannot be reconciled from this facsimile alone.