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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

The exalted mind. The imagination alone has the privilege of being so. The passions must be left to the body. The heart must only be tender. When one has an exalted heart, one loves falsely. One must love in one’s sober senses to love truly.

(Note. the mind sound, but heated.)

Let the streamers float and let the sails swell: the mast alone must remain unshakable.

If it is solid, if it is fixed, if nothing can displace it, that is enough.

September 9.

Folly is the reason of fools (or) the reason of fools is folly. Thus the natural in art is what is not natural.

When thought makes the meter, it must be allowed to remain. And sometimes a writer has sentences that are unbearable [only] because, while the movement of his mind or his thought makes the meter, his diction does not.

September 10.

Expression at rest.

September 11.

One must know how to enter the ideas of others, and one must know how to leave them. One must know how to leave one’s own, and one must know how to return to them.

These kinds of written daybooks would not usefully take the place of a good life, in which forgetting is as necessary as remembering.

Concise style belongs to reflection. One molds what one says when one has thought it forcefully. When one does not think, or thinks little, about what one says, the expression flows and has no form; so what is ingenuous has grace and no precision.

September 13.

It is said that souls have no sex; certainly they do.

September 14.

Those privations in which the will to undertake them is absent. The poor man who undergoes them suffers more from them and finds them harder than the rich man who prescribes them for himself. Whatever the habits, feathers are hard to anyone who would wish to sleep on eiderdown. In the final outcome, it is thought that causes our sensations.

Mme P. [Pastoret] was right yesterday: “The end must be honorable, and the means too.” That decides everything.

Good impulses are nothing if they do not become good actions. In the moral life, to have pleasure, one must set oneself a goal and reach it. Now, everything that is a goal is a limit. Not only is there no virtue where there is no law and rule, there is not even pleasure. Even children’s games have laws and would not exist without them. These rules are always constraining; and the more strictly one observes them, the more one enjoys oneself. Whoever lives without a goal and, as they say, at random, lives sadly.

T88.The source distinguishes the mind, imagination, body and heart. Aime faux is loves falsely, not necessarily insincerely or dishonestly. De sens rassis denotes settled or sober judgment; the English retains the contrast with exaltation. The following Note is Joubert’s own separate paragraph.

T294.Banderolles retains the printed double l. The mast metaphor occupies two physical paragraphs.

T89.The reversed alternatives and the concluding paradox remain. Folie and fols are translated as folly and fools here without assigning a modern medical diagnosis.

T90.The source supplies restrictive [que]; English [only] reflects that intervention in its natural position. The movement of the mind or thought makes the meter, while diction fails to do so. No particular writer or meter is identified.

T296.The restrictive [que] is supplied in the source, not newly restored. Phrazes and fesant retain their printed spelling. The paragraph continues onto page 512 without a new paragraph.

T91.Reposée can suggest repose, composure or a settled state. At rest preserves its relation to the surrounding discussions of movement without adding a specific speaker or emotion.

T92.Éphémérides here suggests records arranged by day. A good life preserves vie, which could refer to a lived life or a biographical life; the fragment does not settle the distinction. The conditional and the necessity of forgetting remain.

T93.Mouler and coulante retain the contrast between molding form and fluent expression. Élocution refers to expression or diction here, not specifically vocal training; naïf retains its uncontrived or ingenuous sense.

T94.Plume and édredon contrast ordinary feathers with eiderdown as bedding. The translation retains the thought that one soft material feels hard to someone wishing for the other, without adding a claim about habituation beyond the source. The initial nominal fragment has no added main clause.

T298.Facsimile inspection confirms quiquonque, not the standard quiconque. Quelques soient is retained without grammatical repair. The initial nominal fragment is not completed. The clipped beginning of the divided résultat is restored.

T95.The source supplies [Pastoret] after the initial P. Honorable renders honnête as morally proper, not merely truthful. Yesterday remains relative to Joubert’s note and is not made into a separate entry date.

T299.[Pastoret] is supplied in the source. Hier does not create an independently assigned date.

T96.Mouvemens means impulses in the moral argument. But and borne are rendered as goal and limit, and the constraints remain a condition of enjoyment. The source supplies the plural [s] in même[s]; English reflects the plural construction without a separate letter insertion.