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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1807

June 6.

There are books of which the idea (I mean the idea one forms of them) is more useful than the knowledge.

June 10.

Reflection is to colors what the echo is to sounds.

Air measures time.

To give soul to things, to words, to lines...

June 11.

“In literature, any genre that has no fixed and invariable bounds is a bad genre.” It was a bad critic who said it, but that bad critic spoke very well.

June 13.

The musician. His instruments. The soul behind.

— enough wit for oneself and one’s friends.

June 15.

— its energy softens everything.

June 16.

Of what amuses the mind too much (in moral philosophy) and consequently does not descend as far as the heart, — to speak like the critics of p—R—.

June 17.

— he does not have a learned taste, — as a professional critic ought to have.

Of those who have a faulty ear and a voice in tune. One can bear the reverse.

June 21.

Winged words like those of Mʳ D-l-l-. Creeping words, like those of Mʳ[…] L-g-v- and Grnd Mxs-nd-nP-rc-v-l etc. Fixed words, moving words, flowing words and dry words, etc.

T71.Air is retained in its ordinary physical sense. The French air can also mean a tune, and temps can carry a musical sense of time or beat; this short isolated sentence does not settle that possibility.

T72.The critic is not identified in the entry. The three uses of bad and the reversal in spoke very well preserve Joubert’s distinction between the speaker and the saying.

T250.Three nominal sentences remain.

T251.The opening dash is heavily abraded but visible as aligned horizontal traces. Assés keeps its acute and final s. The fragment has no finite predicate.

T73.Its avoids assigning the French possessive son to an identified person; his or her is possible if the absent antecedent is a person. The force that softens remains paradoxical.

T252.The initial lowercase son follows a dash. Its referent is not supplied.

T74.Moral philosophy translates la morale in this reflection on writing and criticism. The abbreviation p—R— is retained without expansion or an assertion of which critics are intended.

T253.The abbreviation has lowercase p, uppercase R and long dashes; it is not expanded. The nominal De ce qui construction remains.

T75.Faulty ear and voice in tune convey the musical opposition of fausse and juste without replacing it by a claim about a person’s moral honesty. The reverse remains something one can bear.

T76.All abbreviated names remain as printed and unexpanded. The small unreadable raised mark after the second Mʳ is represented by the source-collation gap, not by a guessed initial. The contrast between winged, creeping, fixed, moving, flowing, and dry remains material and kinetic.