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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

January 17.

What gives the mind only movement makes it active and makes one write. But what gives it light and happiness makes us only meditative.

January 18.

“He has (says Fontanes) dethroned only anarchy.” The saying is beautiful.

Necessary truths, or the necessary portion of truths; and he hides the rest from our eyes.

January 19.

... by concerning oneself only with things to know and not with things to say.

January 20.

Poetry. What makes it. Clear thoughts, words of air, and luminous ones. Gold, pearls, flowers, and diamonds.

What is earthy — little matter — a pure mind that names everything.

Nothing presses the poet. The necessities of life are not at issue here. His art is made for our pleasures and not for our needs.

... like a sequence of luminous and variously colored words.

— blisters of ink and bubbles of soap.

January 21.

Verse. Poetry. Each word in it must hold the mind suspended.

It is a spell in the strict sense; it makes the soul attentive Or rather holds it captive. (La Fontaine.)

These earthy words, sunk into what they say.

they hang upon the lips of one.

A surprise, — when one suddenly sees a common word become so beautiful, a worn word become new.

Like colored glass, — illumination and harmony.

“The music of the soul.” Needs to be in the ear only because meaning and sound must not work against each other.

“How has lead been changed into pure gold?” (Parody of Racine.)

The rightness of meaning...

Let each word have a sound and a meaning so clear that attention rests on it with pleasure and detaches itself with ease to pass to the words that follow, where another pleasure awaits it.

Picture in the mind a quality that softens in words all that is hard, makes clear all that is obscure in them, and colors all that is dark.

The poet has a breath that swells words, makes them light, and gives them color: a tincture, a liquor, like that nectar of the bee that changes the dust of flowers into honey.

To make words flutter.

January 21.

One must try, as much as one can, to despise no one.

January 21.

That in French verse there is, properly speaking, no harmony for the ear if one separates intelligence from the function of the organ. It is meaning that gives our sounds their effect. One can find an Italian line melodious without understanding it, but not a French line. Now here is an exception to the fact, just as a moment ago there was one to the rule.

— Just as, in a long poem, not everything is made to be noticed, not everything is made to be criticized. And that, if criticism itself has such minutiae...

January 22.

Wealth is generous, poverty is generous, mere financial ease is not (if it is orderly).

The sieve, the hopper, and the bolting sieve, these emblems of criticism.

Ears? This term is improper. It is to attention made easy... and to intelligence... Pure and dure have the same sound, if one consults only the ear.

T65.Only governs anarchy, not the act of dethroning. The saying remains attributed to Fontanes, while the man denoted by he remains unnamed in Joubert’s excerpt.

T66.The opening is a nominal fragment. The following he is not given an explicit antecedent in this entry; God is a possible reading, but is not supplied in the body.

T67.The five-paragraph block continues across pages 477–478. Words of air and the luminous words contrast with what is earthy. Earthy retains the material image of terreux rather than implying bawdy content. Blisters of ink and bubbles of soap keep two related but distinct swelling forms, with no invented conclusion.

T307.An enlarged facsimile shows no separating asterisk between the two paragraphs on page 477. The small solid disk above Poësie, below the date, is not a recognizable asterisk and is not treated as a new unit. The dated block continues through the three opening paragraphs on page 478.

T308.The two verse lines in paragraph 2 remain line-broken within one paragraph; the La Fontaine attribution remains on the second line. Lowercase unius begins the separate italic Latin paragraph. The finite N’a follows the fragmentary quotation La musique de l’âme without an additional subject.

T68.The two lines come from the dedication to Madame de Montespan opening book VII of La Fontaine’s Fables. Charme is rendered spell in the sense of enchantment, developed by attentive and captive. The translation preserves two lines and Joubert’s own punctuation and attribution placement, without borrowing an existing English version.

T69.The Latin literally depicts hanging from the mouth or lips of one person: listening with rapt attention. The English retains the plural subject implicit in pendent, without identifying the listeners or adding an attribution not supplied here. Its suspension echoes the mind held suspended above.

T70.The plural verres is read as pieces or panes of colored glass, which give illumination and harmony. Colored glass uses the English material noun rather than implying spectacles or drinking glasses.

T71.The detached Needs clause follows the source’s missing subject after the quoted nominal phrase. Meaning and sound must not oppose one another; the source gives this as the reason the soul’s music needs to be in the ear.

T72.Joubert explicitly labels the line a parody. Racine’s Athalie, III.7, asks how pure gold has become base lead; Joubert reverses the transformation so that lead becomes pure gold. The English follows Joubert’s reversal.

T73.The breath swells and lightens the words, then gives way to tincture and liquor. Liquor has the older broad sense of liquid. The dust of flowers remains the source’s phrase; the account of nectar changing it into honey is not modernized into a biological explanation.

T74.The opening That remains a fragment. Entendre in without understanding it means intellectual comprehension, not simply hearing the line. Intelligence remains separate from the ear as an organ. The stated exceptions to fact and rule are not supplied by the translation.

T75.Each tout n’est pas is read as not everything, rather than nothing. The following And that, if remains an unfinished construction; no conclusion is added.

T76.Aisance here is comfortable means, contrasted with wealth and poverty. Financial ease makes that economic sense explicit. The parenthesis personifies this condition as orderly, without turning the assertion into a claim about every comfortably situated person.

T77.The sieve, hopper, and bolting sieve are separate implements for handling or separating grain and flour. Their use as emblems of criticism remains an unexplained nominal fragment.

T78.These two French words mean pure and hard. They are retained in French in the English paragraph because substituting the English words would misrepresent the claim about their sound. Joubert’s same sound remains his assertion; the consonants differ. The opening It is to and the two ellipses remain incomplete.