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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

Mr. Hochet and Mme de Sévigné.

December 15.

“And by her laughter the goddess was revealed.” How true this is of the imagination!

December 16.

For satisfied self-love is always tender.

December 18.

His language is truly historical, and history will have to change nothing in it to make it noble.

Two kinds of good morality. Literary morality is much more severe than the other, because taste is a faculty more chaste than even chastity itself.

December 19.

... and the sentence ended in this manner at the close of the discourse seems to dismiss attention.

December 20.

In these illnesses, the feeling of life is still so strong that it removes the feeling of death until the last moment.

We distinguish ourselves from our body and our soul, and we say: “Have pity on my soul and my body.” Surely it is not without some secret reason, and without some secret feeling of truth, that we admit in ourselves a third living being composed of two others, one mortal and the other immortal, when we speak to God, who sees all and knows all. We would not speak thus to men, unless it were before God. There is indeed in us, and in the ordinary functions of life we are, a mixed being that sees, thinks, speaks, lives between two others... And do we not say: There is soul in these ideas, in this action, in this discourse?... There are therefore discourses, actions, thoughts into which the soul enters little. What then enters into them? It is we. But we, what are we? A compound. Shall we die? Yes. Will our soul die? Yes. What are its functions? to enlighten and direct us. Will it atone for our faults? Yes. Etc.

“Well of sciences, ocean of learning.” These are only fountains of it.

December 21.

Convalescence. The air of innocence it gives. The passions are at rest and have not resumed their dominion.

December 22.

One says that a mind is in harmony with another mind. But of R., for example, one should say: “His heart was in sympathy with the hearts of all men.”

The habit of writing, even [with] charm, is not enough to have a style. One needs a fixed, firm, unvarying habit, through […] perfect conformity with our natural disposition.

N N’s mind is like those excellent lands where a light scratching is enough to bring forth harvests. But he will not even touch it.

T203.Laughter renders the printed Latin risu; smile is also possible in context. The source’s wording is not silently replaced with a more familiar classical quotation. Only the counterpart of risu receives the source’s emphasis; the rest of the quotation is roman. The familiar parallel in Virgil, Aeneid I.405, has incessu, by her gait, rather than risu. The exact laughter formulation has not been independently located in an ancient source.

T204.Self-love renders amour-propre without reducing it to pride or to a purely benevolent love of oneself. Its satisfaction is the condition for the tenderness asserted here.

T205.Historical describes the unnamed person’s language in relation to how history would present it. The future will have to change nothing is retained; no person or event is identified.

T206.The source distinguishes literary morality from an unnamed other kind. The repeated chaste and chastity preserve the deliberate comparison, without substituting mere correctness or decorum.

T207.Sentence renders phraze. It ends at the close of the discourse and seems to dismiss attention, as though attention were being sent away. The opening ellipsis remains.

T208.The same feeling is named in relation to life and death. The last moment is not supplied with a clinical description, and the illnesses remain unidentified.

T210.The succession of water images remains. Sciences retains the plural sciences, while learning renders scavoir. The demonstrative These leaves the people or things compared to fountains unnamed; the English does not supply an identity or turn fountains into the earlier ocean.

T211.The air of innocence is the appearance convalescence gives. At rest and the passions’ resumed dominion remain distinct; the passions have not yet recovered their rule, rather than having disappeared permanently.

T212.Mind and heart, harmony and sympathy, remain the two pairs of contrasted terms. The unexpanded R. is not assigned an identity. The quoted statement moves from one person’s heart to the hearts of all men.

T341.Il at the damaged right edge after Mais is restored from surviving traces and syntax. R. remains unidentified.

T213.The supplied with reproduces the printed [avec]. A black smear obscures the phrase after par; the remaining gap is preserved as […] rather than filled with an inferred determiner. Natural disposition renders naturel. Fixed, firm, and unvarying preserve the three descriptions of the required habit.

T342.The printed [avec] is source-supplied. A vertical black smear obscures the right edge after par; two independent inspections of the enlarged facsimile cannot establish any intervening word before the next-line conformité, and […] preserves the loss. A determiner such as une is possible but is not restored as fact.

T214.The two initials remain unexpanded. Scratching and harvests retain the agricultural metaphor, and will not preserves the refusal in ne veut pas. The final it refers back to the mind as the land to be worked.