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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1808

January 23.

“The science joyful” or “joyful science.” All painting, all sculpture, all architecture, and all poetry must deserve this name.

January 25.

Sensibility!... It is shifting ground, and cannot serve as a foundation for virtue, which is a firm, stable, invariable thing. Pleasure is fluid.

There is in us something like a reserve of joy and contentment. If nothing troubles this spring, if it keeps its purity, if too much earth or sand does not fill it in... Otherwise we feel its sweetness and refreshment—we are, in short, watered by it—only through overflow.

If Souls see us, they take pleasure in our prostrations when we adore God, whom they see and in whom we believe.

To be happy, one needs only the Soul and God.

... and even then, to be esteemed one must insult with grace.

January 26.

I have let my rules sleep.

January 27.

The jaunty tone that since Voltaire has prevailed in the language.

Eating and drinking affect us only through imagination. But the pleasure that follows them comes from the agreeable imaginings to which they make us more disposed.

January 28.

To be tragic, misfortunes must be rare.

Most of Pascal’s thoughts (on laws, customs, colors) are only Montaigne’s thoughts that he has remade.

Columns in place of the solid wall when the solid wall is not necessary. Columns are supports; this is necessity adorned.

T47.The science joyful deliberately places the adjective after the noun before the more ordinary joyful science. The definite article occurs only in the first phrase, as in the French. Science retains the broad sense of knowledge or art in the enumeration of painting, sculpture, architecture, and poetry.

T48.Sensibility names responsiveness to feeling. The ground, foundation, firmness, stability, invariability, and fluid pleasure preserve the physical terms of the comparison.

T49.Reserve renders fonds before the image becomes a spring. The three conditional clauses remain interrupted. The final French que par débordement is read as restricting both sensing the sweetness and being watered; English dashes make that shared restriction legible without adding a missing outcome to the preceding if clauses.

T464.The three Si clauses remain interrupted by an ellipsis. The following nous n’en sentons has no inserted pas or que to repair its relation to the final restrictive clause. Joye and raffraichissement retain their spellings; the latter has double f and no visible circumflex over i in an enlarged facsimile.

T50.Souls keeps the source’s capital. In whom we believe renders que nous croyons in the contrast with direct sight; the English idiom adds the preposition without introducing an object beyond God. No particular souls are identified.

T51.Soul keeps the source’s initial capital. The restriction only applies to the Soul and God together.

T52.The opening ellipsis and then remain without a supplied occasion. Insult with grace retains the uneasy conjunction rather than reducing it to gentle teasing.

T53.The rules retain their sleep; no particular moral or literary rules are identified.

T54.Jaunty renders leste as an easy, brisk manner of expression. The period word can also criticize a lightness that disregards propriety; that possible edge remains in this description of tone. The nominal phrase has no added main predicate, and no particular Voltaire text is identified.

T467.The nominal subject and its relative clause have no supplied main predicate.

T55.The singular faculty imagination remains distinct from the plural imaginations, rendered imaginings. The latter follow eating and drinking; the sequence is not silently converted into an explanation of appetite beforehand.

T56.The relation to Montaigne remains Joubert’s judgment. Colors follows the qualified French restoration couleurs at the damaged margin; no particular Pascal fragment is supplied as its referent.

T57.The first sentence remains a nominal construction. The negative pas at the damaged margin is a qualified French restoration. Columns retain both their support and adornment; no particular building is identified.

T469.The opening remains a nominal phrase with a lorsque clause. Pas meets the heavy right-edge smear and is a qualified restoration from its surviving initial p and the construction.