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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

All those young minds the revolution warmed and made hatch before their time, before their age.

The purple of the setting sun. Magnificent. (From life. Sᵗ Martin.) And what draperies in the clouds, what semblances of a canopy, a bed, and curtains!

To judge matters of taste, one must give oneself time to taste them.

— and who love what is good only when it expresses what they think.

March […]7.

They have not even penetrated matter.

Let us seek in beautiful verse the materials of a beautiful prose.

Not to extend the sound beyond what the meaning needs in order to be shown whole.

This oratorical style often has the drawbacks of those operas in which the music prevents one from hearing the words. Here the words prevent one from seeing the thoughts.

All those writings of which there remains, as from the sight of a brook (rolling some clear waters over small pebbles), only the memory of words that have fled.

— Not so much a multitude as an assembly, a chorus of words, each arranged in its rank and each having its color, its figure, and its necessary function.

March 18.

To model or mold reasons, to paint them, to sculpt them. To put relations into images.

... Those drinks that fill the mind with intoxications more formidable than those of wine.

It must be (says Longinus, and the ancient rhetoricians used to say) “passion that makes the figures.” Now temper is a passion. Even gaiety is one.

T274.Échauffés and éclore sustain the image of warmth producing premature hatching or emergence. The two time phrases remain distinct and repetitive. The translation does not turn Joubert’s judgment into a dated account of any particular young writer.

T275.Ad vivum is translated “From life,” with the Latin wording retained in the French paragraph. Sᵗ Martin is left in its abbreviated form without an expanded place or personal name. The draperies and furnishings remain appearances in the clouds.

T276.Taste and taste them preserve the repetition of goût and goûter. The verb includes savoring or appreciating, not merely reaching an immediate verdict.

T277.Matière can denote physical matter or the subject being examined. “Matter” leaves that possibility open; the plural subject is unnamed.

T278.The introductory infinitive remains an instruction in fragment form. The meaning, not the sound, is what must be shown whole.

T279.The brook simile retains Joubert’s shift from waters to words that have fled. The second physical paragraph belongs to the same printed block but remains a distinct fragment; “figure” keeps the bodily or visible form given to each word.

T468.Two physical paragraphs remain one block. The first opening Tous has no supplied main clause beyond its relative construction.

T280.The two near-sounding verbs are distinct: modeling gives form directly, while molding uses a mold. The plural reasons and relations remain objects of making and imaging, rather than being replaced with a general instruction to reason vividly.

T281.Compare chapter XXXI of Boileau’s French On the Sublime: passion should produce rhetorical figures in a fitting circumstance, and the chapter also calls laughter a passion. Joubert compresses the formulation and adds temper and gaiety. Humeur is disposition or temper here, not simply comic humor.