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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

Milton. — Molded heaven on the temple.

... [you] will have no more formidable antagonists than generous enemies.

Literary things belong to the intellectual world. To speak of them with the passions of this one is contrary to propriety, to proportion, to good spirit and good sense. Mr. Delalot’s fires, flames, vehemences, and indignations are ridiculous. He writes about words as it is permissible and natural to write only about mores. I dare say it: if there is nothing affected in him, at least everything is out of place.

Let us have the merit of the age if we have its faults. Struck by the harm, let us love the compensations.

One must treat things of the mind with the mind, not with the body, blood, bile, and humors. Mr. Delalot’s irritated eloquence, energy, and petulances are affections naturally incompatible with what moves him.

Such combats ought to be fought only among inhabitants of the air.

In such a case, one must wait to speak until anger has fallen silent.

It is a bad use of the soul’s strength, it is a corruption of fire, light, and movement.

February 6.

... Suspends attention through words that are themselves suspended (like the earth, balanced by its own weights). Balanced by their own meaning and brought sufficiently into equilibrium.

There must also, in some sense, be nothing in verse, true verse, but roundnesses flattened or unfolded.

— Degeneration of a beautiful genre.

There is spring in his style, but a spring that lets itself be seen too much or makes itself felt too much. Like those steel sinews on the psaltery.

There is concord, and no charm, between the tones.

— who, for faults of style, have severities scarcely permissible against faults of conduct. Upon bad writings [they] pour the gall that must be kept for bad actions.

...to amuse a public that is no longer amusable.

T144.The past plural Moulèrent has no expressed subject. The English past-tense fragment supplies neither they nor an identification. Heaven is molded on the temple, not the reverse.

T145.[You] supplies the second-person singular subject marked by the French future verb. The comparison means that no antagonists will be more formidable than generous enemies. Generous can include nobility or magnanimity; the enemy’s generosity is not replaced by kindness alone.

T362.The three-dot opening and the subjectless negative n’auras are printed; no subject or restrictive complement is supplied in the French. The partly clipped second line of généreux is restored.

T146.The demonstrative this one is left unresolved in the body. In context it can point to the ordinary world and its passions, as opposed to the intellectual world, though the latter is the nearest named world. Mores retains the distinction between criticism of conduct and criticism of words. The plural fires, flames, vehemences, and indignations remains.

T147.Body, blood, bile, and humors retain the older bodily vocabulary. Affections means states or movements of feeling here, not loving attachments. The three paragraphs remain one block. The last French tû is masculine after feminine colère; the English preserves anger becoming silent without altering the French agreement.

T148.Suspends remains a finite third-person verb without an added subject. The Latin is from Ovid, Metamorphoses I.12–13. Ovid’s surrounding sentence says that the earth was not yet suspended; Joubert extracts balanced by its own weights for a positive comparison. The plural ponderibus and the balancing image remain, without a modern gravitational explanation. The next Balanced refers to the words and keeps the separate fragment.

T149.Rondeurs, applaties, and déployées retain a spatial form that is rounded, then flattened or unfolded. The apparent incompatibility is not resolved into a technical rule about meter.

T150.Ressort is both spring and spring-like force. The steel sinews are the psaltery’s strings, with nerfs retaining a bodily image. Concord and charm in the next paragraph remain separate qualities of the tones.

T151.The opening relative clause remains without a named antecedent. [They] supplies the plural subject marked by versent so the English pour cannot read as an imperative. Gall preserves the bitter bodily fluid in the moral comparison.

T152.Amusable keeps the repeated amuse root and the source’s assertion that the public can no longer be amused. The absence of a space after the opening ellipsis follows the French.