Diotimos Reading Desk

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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

“I shall lay [I shall place] my bow in the clouds.” As though he were laying it down there, as though he wished to use it no longer.

“Everything is a riddle in the poets,” Plato said. But in these sorts of riddles there must be both an apparent meaning that is beautiful and a hidden meaning that is more beautiful.

Voltaire sometimes enters poetry, but leaves it at once. This impatient and restless mind cannot settle there, or even pause there for a little while.

To give words clarity, color, recession, and relief.

February 26.

But if one divides what is simple, if one wishes to dissect what is one, if one distributes into several limbs what has no joint, one destroys it, one makes it unrecognizable at once. One has chopped it up, one has destroyed it, and yet one believes one has analyzed it.

“To sit on the bushel.” — “To put the ruler in one’s head” (to free one’s hands of it). — “... the compasses in the eye,” Michelangelo said. This expression is so clear and thereby so natural that the people have it everywhere, and it will forever be adopted in every place where it is spoken and by all who have heard it a single time. Every utterance that expresses a thought well is its clothing, its own body, its inseparable accompaniment, its natural companion.

I call imagination the faculty of making perceptible to the senses all that is intellectual, of embodying what is spirit, and, in a word, of bringing to light without altering its nature what is invisible in itself.

February […]7.

To write with the mind and with thought. What is written this way appears more luminous at first. There is always phosphorus in it, that phosphorus I was speaking of when I said: “If the poet’s finger had passed its phosphorus into it...”

F.V. “The rascal’s good sense sometimes frightens me.” It always seems to me that this duelist has a plaster over his eye from some blow he received. He is a bold one-eyed man! The other is merely cross-eyed. The third always has his throat clogged.

The exception always comes from the reason for the rule.

Then the mind yields its grasses, but not its fruits. It works with what surrounds it, but not with what is within it. It brings into play only its opinions, not its innermost thoughts, coloring and modeling according to its fancies the clouds that wander around it. Thus it obtains only what it gives. It amuses attention. But as what it makes does not come from the soul, it does not go there either.

Montesquieu. He dictated what he remembered having thought. Thus all those little fillings that give pleasure in reading, but that memory values little, are absent from his writings.

T201.Bow retains the weapon sense developed by the comment about no longer using it. The bracketed I shall place mirrors [je placerai] beside I shall lay; neither alternative is silently discarded. The switch from first-person quotation to third-person comment remains.

T202.The attribution to Plato is Joubert’s. A close parallel occurs in the Second Alcibiades, 147b–c, where poetry as a whole is said to be enigmatic by nature. This supports a likely reference, not an assertion that Joubert’s compressed French is a verbatim quotation. Apparent meaning and hidden meaning are both required; the hidden meaning must be more beautiful, not simply different.

T203.Fuyant and relief are paired pictorial qualities: apparent recession and projection. They are not rendered as uncertainty and emotional relief. The infinitive remains a fragment.

T204.The one is treated as a unity without joints. The bodily vocabulary of dissecting, limbs, and chopping remains, along with the repeated destroys and destroyed. The result is called unrecognizable before the false claim to have analyzed it.

T205.Boisseau is the bushel measure, not an invented seat. Règle can mean rule or ruler; the physical ruler is foregrounded by the hands, head, and compasses in the eye. The Michelangelo attribution remains Joubert’s report. Every utterance becomes the thought’s clothing and body, with pensée as the possessor.

T206.Sensible means perceptible to the senses, not reasonable. Embodying retains the bodily force of incorporer. Without altering its nature preserves the limit placed on imagination: bringing the invisible to light must not distort it.

T207.This recalls the earlier fragment at II481 concerning the poet’s finger. The tense here is past perfect, had passed, where the earlier fragment uses imperfect fesoit. It remains unspecified; its phosphorus is read as the finger’s, though the poet remains a possible possessor. The date retains only the visible final 7 before February.

T412.The initial date digit is lost at the gutter; visible 7 is not expanded to 27. Secure clipped d’abord, phosphore and passer are restored. Ecrire lacks an initial accent and poëte retains its diaeresis.

T208.The quoted verse is spoken by Damis in Piron’s La Métromanie, line 865 of the checked text. The adjacent F.V. is left unexpanded and is not assigned as the quotation’s author. Duelist preserves the fighting image; the eye plaster, one-eyed boldness, cross-eyed second figure, and clogged throat of the third remain physical comparisons. No identities are invented.

T209.Herbes is rendered as grasses, preserving the vegetable contrast with fruits without making the first term specifically medicinal or culinary herbs. The mind works on surrounding clouds of opinion rather than its inward thoughts. The final direction from and to the soul remains.

T210.Remembered having thought retains the prior thought behind the dictation. Fillings keeps the small additions that please reading but have little value for memory, rather than calling them errors.