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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

How often in writing do we use in our work expressions suited to what ought to be there, but at odds with what is...

Ker-louche and Ker-borgne. And, on that subject, this ker must correspond to the Germanic her and be a title of honor.

In Plato. That eloquence which dispenses with all passions and has no need of them to triumph. That is the character of this great metaphysician.

One must read the books of the ancients like a dictionary, an encyclopedia of style in which one finds, in examples, the art of saying everything with delicacy, with good taste, with beauty. For they speak of everything in beautiful language, with a gentle accent.

But, by his own admission, Socrates made the young malicious and mocking. See what he says in the Apology.

March […]4.

And (in composition) at first the mind works only on these first apparitions, on certain phantoms formed by vapors that its first fire raises from it.

These maxims, the human race cut them out. My memory then does what the memory of others would do.

At the bottom of our mind there is another mind, at the bottom of our taste another taste.

Seven garments of the soul.

Expressions that have the fault of truly being expressions. Expressions by pressure.

My ideas! It is the house to lodge them in that costs me such effort to build.

Like the savor of air or that of light, or that of thought... That is what Plato offers good taste.

The need to speak supplied the orator with words. The need to write continually, colder and less pressing, supplies fewer and less lively ones.

T223.The two constructed names are retained in French: louche means cross-eyed or squint-eyed, and borgne means one-eyed. Joubert’s proposed relation between ker and Germanic her is presented as his inference. The printed single-r her is not silently standardized, and the passage is not treated as an established etymology.

T224.The young become malicious and mocking in Joubert’s judgment. The appeal to the Apology remains his source reference; the English does not turn the remark into a direct quotation from Socrates.

T225.The mind’s first fire raises vapors from it, forming phantoms on which it initially works. The visual and thermal images remain together. The date retains the visible final 4 rather than supplying a lost leading digit.

T431.The gutter damages the beginning of the date; visible 4 is retained without certifying a complete day. Secure clipped premières and que are restored.

T226.Cut them out keeps découpa in the past tense and retains the detached opening These maxims. The following sentence moves to present does and conditional would do. The material from which the maxims were cut is not specified.

T227.The repeated mind and taste are retained within their respective depths. Seven garments remains a separate paragraph; no inventory of the garments or external doctrine is supplied.

T228.The repeated expressions carries its literal sense of pressing or squeezing out as well as verbal expression. Pressure makes the physical wordplay visible; the opening fault is not replaced by a smoother general criticism.

T229.The ideas are to be lodged in a house whose construction costs effort. The source does not say that the ideas themselves are difficult to obtain.

T230.The senses remain deliberately crossed: air, light, and thought each have a savor offered to good taste. No concrete object is supplied as the subject of Like.

T231.The first supplied is past, while the second supplies is present, following the French tenses. Continually belongs to the necessity of writing. Colder and less pressing describe that necessity, not the words themselves.