Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1807

They (people of wit) say them and make them (mistakes) like others, but they recognize them.

What we shall have done, we shall know for a long time, we shall know forever.

May 18.

A certain “inner music” (to speak as Mme de Staël does) transports us when our soul is in harmony. For our soul is an instrument that delights in its own accord, just as it suffers from its discord.

May 20.

Grave philosophy and malicious, mocking philosophy.

The sight of trees nourishes life; the sight of men, the passions.

Cicero (philosophical works). A borrowed wisdom and foreign doctrines flow there from his mouth accustomed to eloquence.

As there is sometimes speech in music... And the prosaic verse, put in its place, is poetic and good, provided it expresses a thought, a feeling, a movement, or a repose that is not common. And if this state endures, then man must die is a verse of this kind. It is certainly not prosaic in its matter, I mean in the opinion it contains, quite the contrary!

If they did not know God, they had at least an idea of him, formless and by that very fact insufficient, yet useful nonetheless.

May 22.

It is not through the head that men touch one another.

May 23.

We are deceived with numbers just as well, and better (or worse), than with colors.

May 26.

— and, if we read them with pleasure, it is because we read them with trust.

May 27.

... nor the seriousness of affairs. — those I have involved myself in always being other people’s.

Affairs. They alone give weight by bending the mind toward the earth.

T51.The delayed parenthetical mistakes identifies what is said and done. Say them and make them preserve the deliberately compressed distinction; recognize does not imply that the mistakes were intended.

T52.Shall have done retains the future perfect, followed by two repeated future assertions of knowing. For a long time and forever remain successive formulations.

T53.The quoted phrase and Mme de Staël attribution remain inside the paragraph. Accord and discord preserve the musical word family; the final pronoun refers grammatically to the instrument in French. Musique intérieure occurs in the final song in Corinne XX.5, in preparation for death. That parallel supports the phrase, not Joubert’s following account of accord, discord, and the instrument; no exact-copy relationship is asserted.

T237.The nominal comparison remains without a finite predicate.

T238.The second clause retains its omitted verb.

T54.Philosophical works translates opera philosophica and retains its source emphasis. Wisdom and foreign doctrines flow from a mouth accustomed to eloquence; no work title or source of the doctrines is added.

T55.The opening As clause remains unfinished. The single quoted verse keeps its own line within one paragraph and receives no new punctuation. Its external author has not been identified here. Common renders vulgaires without making it necessarily obscene. The small solid mark after matière is documented in the French collation; it is not supplied as an asterisk, note call, letter, or paragraph break.

T56.If retains the conditional or concessive possibility, and the unnamed plural subject remains unnamed. Formlessness makes the idea insufficient in the source’s argument, yet it remains useful.

T57.Touch retains the bodily verb and its possible figurative force. The sentence supplies no alternative organ or way of reaching another person.

T58.Better (or worse) preserves Joubert’s self-correcting comparison, without deciding whether success in deception is good. Numbers translates nombres; no particular numerical scheme is supplied.

T59.Them has no antecedent supplied in this fragment. Because translates the contextually certain function of the qualified printed parcc; the French spelling is retained and documented separately.

T60.Affairs keeps the repeated affaires without restricting it to commerce. The opening nor and the following dependent construction remain fragments. Bending the mind toward the earth preserves the physical image.

T241.Two physical paragraphs are retained. The initial ni fragment and the following lowercase celles construction remain incomplete.