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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

Mr. Hochet and Mme de Sévigné.

August 4.

The orator must distrust his imagination, and the metaphysician must give himself over to it (that is, give himself over to his own).

August 16.

Excepting the disposition toward the sublime, every marked talent excludes intelligence from a portion of its universal domain.

August 18.

X says today that “Bossuet is sometimes jarring, commonplace, subtle, and in bad taste.” That may be; but one must be a Zoilus to know it. “The ancients (says the critic) reproached Demosthenes for stiffness and monotony.” That does not justify...

August 19.

Leander’s saying, “Drown me only on my return,” is at bottom the same as Ajax’s: “Make us perish in the light of day.” But because of the circumstances, Ajax’s saying is heroic and Leander’s merely gallant. Circumstances form for actions and words a kind of place that raises to itself and makes smaller or greater what happens or is said in their midst.

Affected harmony and elegance. Only clarity, only extreme clarity, is what one must aim at and what it matters to attain in style.

August 21.

“Without language, in a word...”

One does not like to find in a book extraordinary words that divert our attention from everything else not through their beauty, but through their singularity. — One does not like words in a book that one could not allow oneself to say. One tolerates and likes them in old authors, because there they are a fact of literary history. They show the birth of language. In the moderns, they show only its corruption.

One likes to do one’s good deeds oneself.

“The head of tyranny was veiled,” Mr. Cr. says very well. Yes, it was veiled, it even had a mask, like the executioner of Charles I.

August 23.

Health? Yes, it helps one keep one’s mind, but it also helps one keep one’s madness.

August 25.

Answer: — Those with whom one is happy without speaking to them.

August 27.

In all things, virtue makes one believe. And to believe is not to know, is not to have knowledge.

Michelangelo at first disdained oil painting, “whose procedures seemed finicky to him.”

T63.The orator distrusts his own imagination; the metaphysician gives himself over to his own. Joubert explicitly supplies the latter clarification in a parenthesis, which is retained instead of silently expanding the first pronoun.

T267.The printed August 4 date is preserved in source order after the preceding page’s August 14 and damaged […]3; no chronological repair is made.

T64.Marked talent remains distinct from intelligence. The domain belongs to intelligence; the exception is the disposition toward the sublime. The translation does not reduce the claim to a limitation on one particular profession.

T65.X remains unidentified. Zoilus retains the named type of a hostile critic rather than being replaced by a newly identified contemporary. The charge of stiffness and monotony against Demosthenes is quoted as the critic’s statement. The final That does not justify remains unfinished.

T269.X remains unidentified. Zoïle and sçavoir preserve their printed diacritics. The final clause ends in an ellipsis.

T66.The two sayings remain as Joubert records them, with their contrasting circumstances. Gallant refers to Leander’s amorous setting and is not treated as another word for heroic. No speech or speaker is supplied within either quotation. The Leander wording occurs in Voltaire’s Sur Léandre (Garnier, volume XVIII, p. 560); an ancient parallel occurs in Martial’s Liber de spectaculis. Ajax’s request corresponds to Iliad XVII.645–647. These parallels do not establish which intervening texts Joubert used.

T67.Raises to itself preserves the unusual monte à soi in the source’s account of circumstances. The place and the smaller or greater scale remain spatial images; the translation does not replace the phrase with a generalized claim that context changes meaning.

T68.The opening affected harmony and elegance remains a noun phrase. Clarity is repeated and intensified to extreme clarity, the sole stated object to aim at and attain.

T69.The quoted Without language, in a word is a separate physical paragraph. No completing line is added. The following paragraph gives Joubert’s own discussion of unusual words. The fragment is from Boileau’s L’Art poétique, Chant I.

T271.The quoted verse fragment occupies its own physical paragraph before the prose discussion; its continuation is not supplied.

T70.The attention is diverted by singularity rather than beauty. The old authors’ words are valued as evidence of language’s birth; in the moderns, the same kinds of words signify its corruption. The distinction is Joubert’s, not an editorial rule imposed on his own historical spelling.

T71.The head remains veiled and then masked in the reply. Mr. Cr. is an unexpanded source abbreviation. Charles I names the king as printed; no executioner’s identity is added.

T72.Mind and madness preserve the contrast of esprit and folie. The repeated helps one keep applies to both, retaining the paradox without making the entry an instruction about health.

T73.Answer is Joubert’s imperative. The following Those fragment gives no completed question, definition, or named group; none is invented.

T74.The French distinguishes croire, connoître, and sçavoir. Believe, know, and have knowledge preserve the repeated denials without imposing a particular technical distinction between the two kinds of knowing. Virtue makes one believe, not necessarily believe a newly supplied proposition.

T75.Michelangelo gives the usual English form of Michel Ange. Finicky renders minutieux as the dismissive judgment quoted here. The source names no author for the quotation, and no new attribution is supplied.