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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1807

The false mind. Say, the mind made false.

One should put into a book only the dose of wit required; but in conversation one may have more than is required. M. R. does not have much wit.

July 19.

You call symmetry antithesis? But antithesis is only a figure of words, a false figure. Symmetry is a real figure, a beautiful figure, a balancing of thoughts. Your error comes from inattention, haste, prejudice, and ignorance.

July 21.

That criticism should distinguish character and not confuse it with the faults or the defect.

July 23.

To add one’s own light to what is obscure and one’s own unction to what is dry.

Music in the midst of dangers lifts thoughts higher.

July 26.

We do not have time to know everything that is good. Look at Plautus’s Trinummus. Who has spoken much of it?

July 30.

Spinning out one’s sentences is forbidden by no principle of taste, and may sometimes even be prescribed by necessity.

July 31.

If the details of moral nature do not have an altogether different merit and an altogether different character from those of physical nature.

To take care, in writing, not to sink the plowshare so deep that one can no longer draw it out of one furrow to carry it into another. That is an important precept, but difficult to observe if one writes with any force at all.

Illusion and wisdom united, charm of life and art!

To wish to express such fine ideas faithfully is to wish to paint from nature an object that flees and reappears continually, only to show itself for a moment. One must wait despite oneself; one must search.

T93.The English repeats false to retain the connection between faux and faussé: the second expression presents the mind as having been distorted. It does not supply a cause or agent.

T94.The restriction applies to a book; the permission for more than is required applies to conversation. The repeated wit links both with M. R., whose initials remain unexpanded.

T274.M. R. remains unexpanded. The restrictive and comparative clauses retain their distinct constructions.

T95.Figure repeats in all four uses. Balancing preserves the motion and equilibrium of balancement without treating Joubert’s proposed distinction as a universally accepted definition of antithesis.

T275.Appellez retains double l. A small stray mark after the date’s terminal point is not securely a second punctuation point.

T96.The dependent That remains without a new governing verb. Faults is plural and defect singular, as printed. Character is not silently rewritten as a fault to remove the distinction.

T276.The opening Que has no expressed governing clause. Les fautes is plural, while le défaut is singular.

T97.Unction retains onction, including its association with oil and with a moving, inward warmth of expression. It is not used in the pejorative sense of insincere flattery. The infinitive remains. The Académie’s 1798 Onction entry (II, p. 190) includes anointing, inward religious consolation, and speech that moves the heart toward devotion.

T98.Spinning out retains the thread metaphor of filer. The passage explicitly permits it, so the English phrase is not intended to imply that such extension is always tedious. The source emphasis is retained.

T99.If retains the open Si clause and its final period; whether is another possible reading of its notebook-like inquiry. No consequence or affirmative answer is supplied.

T278.The Si clause ends with a period and has no expressed consequent.

T100.Not makes explicit the avoidance already conveyed by prendre garde de in this warning. Plowshare and furrow preserve the agricultural comparison. With any force at all conveys pour peu que, not only writing with great force.

T279.The exclamatory nominal phrase has no supplied finite verb.

T101.Fine renders déliées in the sense of subtle or delicate, not simply excellent. Paint from nature retains the practice of working from a present object, and the object’s repeated flight is not replaced by a fixed abstraction.