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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1808

January 18.

Harmony and periods. If they can do without them, and if they have the good sense and the talent to be read with pleasure without employing these periods? Writing is not singing — and when the sense is so clear that it holds the mind and satisfies it without the ear needing sound and noise...

That author who said he ate strawberries “weeping with ripeness”!!!!!! Inanimation would be better than such animation.

The passions of the young are vices in old age.

The wicked have nothing human but their passions: these are almost their virtues.

January 19.

“Beauty without the graces, a hook without bait,” said Ninon.

One has fewer ideas then, but more good ones.

To pass from jurists or sages to peers is to descend and go backward.

January 20.

A beautiful name adorns them as well as, and better than, a beautiful garment could.

January 21.

Mezeray, the last of the Gauls.

January 22.

Illness and retreat. The one cures one of passions, and the other makes one live without distractions.

Of the dry light that the ancients wished for the mind.

Taste! taste... The mind does not always eat. It has faculties other than taste, and appetites other than that of tasting. It has its sight, it has eyes; it touches, it sniffs, it combines, etc.

T37.Periods are rounded units of rhetorical prose, not spans of time. The repeated conditional clauses end in a question without an added main clause. The final when clause remains unfinished; sound and noise stay distinct.

T38.The opening description of the unnamed author has no expressed main predicate. All six exclamation marks remain. Inanimation preserves the paired terms for absence and presence of animation in the criticism of a figurative description. No author is identified from the quotation.

T457.The initial relative phrase has no expressed main predicate. Six exclamation marks follow the closing guillemet, counted in an enlarged facsimile. The unnamed author is not identified.

T39.The plural graces remains beside beauty. The quotation has no supplied verb between its two images. Ninon remains the name supplied by Joubert.

T40.Then retains alors without supplying an occasion from a neighboring, separately divided entry. The comparison is fewer ideas but a greater number of good ones.

T41.Jurists renders jurisconsultes; peers is retained as the distinct term for pairs. No specific chamber, country, or constitutional episode is supplied. Both downward movement and backward movement remain.

T42.The unnamed plural remains unnamed. The double comparison as well as and better than is retained, together with the conditional could.

T458.The unnamed plural les remains. The comparative ne and conditional pourroit are retained.

T43.Mezeray keeps the terminal y on this page, distinct from Mezerai on page 638. Gauls renders the compressed Gaulois. The period word can also evoke frank sincerity or the manners and language of earlier French life; the epithet does not establish which particular trait Joubert intended.

T44.Retreat renders retraite as withdrawal in the paired reflection. Illness is said to cure passions, while retreat removes distractions; the two claims are not exchanged.

T45.The dry light remains a material image applied to mind. The opening Of remains without a governing clause. A parallel occurs in Bacon’s essay on friendship in Lasalle’s 1799 translation, where the image is attributed to Heraclitus. That parallel does not establish Joubert’s source or his exact ancient witness.

T460.The opening De phrase has no supplied governing clause.

T46.Taste, tasting, and eating preserve the aesthetic faculty and its bodily analogy. Sniffs keeps the active sensory image of flaire. The repetition of sight and eyes remains, and the final combines is not given a supplied object.