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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

Tuesday, June 18.

To know oneself is a duty. But we are not commanded to know others. Observing their faults (beyond the first glance) is useful for affairs, but useless to our virtues. It is even harmful to us.

That one must not perpetually substitute one’s mind for one’s soul. The soul judges planes (a term from painting); the mind judges only points (that is, stippling, another term from painting).

To say of a man who is vain and talkative: he is a good father, a good neighbor, an affectionate host, is to judge him with one’s soul. To say, on the contrary, of the father who is a good man, the helpful neighbor and hospitable property owner, that he is talkative, is to judge with one’s mind. It is to forget the face for the wart and the plane for the point, as I was saying.

The more I think of it, the more I see that the mind is something outside the soul, as hands are outside the body, eyes beyond the head, branches beyond the trunk. It helps one to be able, but not to be more.

June 19.

“Performed to pipes at the nagalensibus games...” Performed to pipes: it seems to me that I read these words at the head of all Racine’s tragedies.

June 20.

An instrument too new, — like a violin that has not been played enough.

It matters not only to distinguish good from evil well, but also not to confuse what is laughable with what is not. To make laughable what is not is, in a way, to make bad what was good.

— for one sees that he seeks nothing. He perceives no other light beyond the light he has; — like the traveler who rejoices from afar at the light of some lamp.

June 22.

Of the need for familiarity, and where it drove those whose station forbade it.

June 24.

I still have duties to fulfill in society, but I no longer have an office, a function there.

June 26.

Passions in their fullness, — like so many fattened victims.

June 28.

These are things whose truth belongs to another world and of which only the imagination (or the mere imagining) belongs to this one.

T56.Plans refers to planes in painting, not plans of action; pointillé is work in dots or stippling. Joubert’s two parenthetic explanations remain in the text.

T57.Officieux means helpful or obliging here, not officious in the modern English sense. The repetition of the family man, neighbor and host becomes an argument for the soul’s broader judgment; the face, wart, plane and point remain concrete.

T58.Pouvoir is a bare infinitive: the translation leaves able without adding a specified deed or object. The contrast with être plus, being more, remains ontological and compressed rather than becoming merely doing more.

T59.The Latin is translated as a theatrical performance accompanied by pipes. The printed nagalensibus is retained unexpanded in English. The didascalia to Terence’s Hecyra has ACTA LVDIS MEGALENSIBVS and separately specifies pipe instrumentation, a close primary parallel rather than an exact match to Joubert’s phrasing. No festival name is silently corrected in the French.

T60.Risible means capable of provoking laughter, not necessarily contemptible or ridiculous. Laughable retains the repeated term; the moral transformation at the end remains Joubert’s comparison.

T61.Fortune is read as social station or circumstances, which can restrict familiar relations. The masculine il most readily resumes besoin, the need; the second it remains compressed rather than changing the French’s grammatical subject to familiarity. No destination is supplied after where.

T62.Victimes grasses suggests victims fattened for sacrifice. The translation preserves the image without supplying the ritual or the agent who would sacrifice them.

T63.The French parenthesis prints où, where. The English interprets it as the alternative conjunction or, expected in the distinction between imagination and imaginement, while retaining the printed French and recording the intervention here. The unusual imaginement is rendered as imagining, without supplying a theory of mental images.