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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

They roll them for a long time in their thought, and the words bear the mark of the place where they have stayed.

With sand one makes mirrors, flesh with colors, music with noises from which one has known how to draw sounds. With marble one makes buildings that seem airy; with mere forms one presents to the mind more solidities than all the rocks of the earth, piled one on another, could seem to have.

Solids are on earth. Solidity is in God, that is, in his idea. There the artist takes it, to apply it and attach it to linen and paper when he pleases.

Look at those statues the Italians fashion with napkins, and those columns of cardboard, etc.

Poetry is imaginary. It is so essentially, as are all the fine arts. And that is why they are beautiful. For nothing is beautiful but the idea.

Ah! the soul is separate from the body, and there is something in it that does not depend on the organs.

Of the regular forms of the sentence. For it has them. With much attention, one could classify them and determine their number.

He has a bitter zeal for good taste. All bedecked with incongruities.

February 5.

Hollow? Yes, like molds.

— pleasing to memory more than to mere reading, which does not hold them near enough to true attention.

Yes, all that was easy to say has been well said. The rest is our business, or our task. Painful task!

Difficult things will in their turn become easy. — To bring charm into what one has fathomed; and to bring into these dark caverns, entered only recently, the pure and ancient clarity of ages less learned but more luminous than ours.

All ways of recalling these beautiful forms are good, and all the materials to which one can apply them have (by this very merit alone of being able to be their subject, their substratum) a sufficient usefulness.

But “one must know how to read, before reading them,” the poets.

Once one has tasted the sap of words, the mind can no longer do without it. In them one drinks thought.

These words in which thought is drunk, — why should I not say it? If one can say “drink with the eyes,” one can say it, and certainly it has been said. As people have said “eat with the eyes” and “swallow with the eyes.” — “They swallow it with their eyes, point it out to one another with a finger,” says Lafontaine.

T133.Glaces is read as mirrors or looking glasses made from glass, not ice. Noises and sounds remain different. The plural solidités is retained as solidities before the following paragraph distinguishes material solids from solidity itself.

T134.Solidity is located in God, then in son idée. His idea follows God as grammatical possessor; the compressed phrase can also suggest the idea of solidity. The English does not resolve this into a detailed theory. Linen and paper remain the named supports to which the artist attaches it.

T135.Serviettes is read as napkins, fashioned into sculptural forms. The source does not identify a particular demonstration or artist. The cardboard columns remain a separate example.

T136.Fantastique denotes what belongs to imagination rather than an evaluative fantastic or a supernatural genre. The same property is extended to all the fine arts. The final singular the idea remains the sole thing called beautiful.

T137.The nominal second sentence has no supplied subject. Chamarré retains the image of elaborate, incongruous decoration rather than being reduced to inconsistent.

T138.Formes is read as molds in the reply to Hollow; the generic sense of forms remains possible. The adjective creuses is feminine plural, without an explicit noun in this entry. No claim that hollowness means worthlessness is supplied.

T139.Fathomed keeps the depth implicit in approfondi, then developed into dark caverns. The less learned ages are nonetheless more luminous; these qualities are not treated as identical. The two infinitives remain part of the detached instruction.

T140.The materials have usefulness because they can serve as the subject or underlying support of beautiful forms. Substratum retains the printed Latin technical term and italics; its meaning is explained here rather than replacing it in the text.

T141.The poets is held until after the quoted instruction, as in the French. The initial know how to read is not reduced to merely recognizing letters. No named source for the saying is asserted.

T142.Suc is sap or juice. The following entry insists on the bodily metaphor of drinking thought, and the English preserves it rather than substituting understanding or absorbing.

T143.The quoted line comes from La Fontaine’s L’Huître et les Plaideurs, Fables IX.9. The checked French text has se la montrent, referring to the oyster, while Beaunier prints se le montrent. The source variant remains on the French side; English it cannot reproduce the gender difference. The verse remains embedded in the prose paragraph as printed.