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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

... as a spider that had no legs would have no less skill within itself to weave its web.

[Reading Fr. André.] Symmetry must be striking in inanimate objects, as in buildings, for example. It must be only faintly perceptible in other things.

Plato was right to suggest that Love of the beautiful is a naturally moderate and peaceful love, a gentle and smiling feeling.

All great attention is always double, and when one looks ahead of oneself, one looks within oneself.

One must admit it: there is a temperament of the soul very often opposed to that of the body.

November 11.

The tulip is a flower without a soul, but the rose and the lily seem to have one. (The former is beautiful as a young girl.) The rose is a flower of flesh, the tulip a flower of fabric, of taffeta. The lily is beautiful as a young man, and one knows to what beauties the rose is often compared. The tulip is a piece of painted paper.

A ruminant brain. And perhaps the bee too is ruminant. Honey is not made without kneading it.

“Literature (says M. de Bonnald) is the expression of society.” There are books so beautiful that in them literature is only the expression of those who made them.

November 12.

Racine. His elegance is perfect, but it is not supreme like Virgil’s.

A beautiful expression is always a portion of a truth (perceived or unperceived). It is a sample of its fabric, a shaft of its light that has shone on us and fled from us. — If we misapply this shaft, if we carry this ray about apart from its own beam, if we display this piece (remnant is too ample) far from its length of cloth, it remains beautiful but produces no effect. Add: when this sample is lost among rags, one must know how to distinguish it from them and draw it out.

A sample of her dress, or a sample of the fabric in which she is fit to be clothed.

She seems to sing her flowering through a scale of five colors. (The hydrangea.)

One is happy when one leaves health to enter wisdom.

Joy is better than pleasure, since it is a pleasure common to ourselves and others.

T166.The opening remains an unfinished comparison. The English preserves a retained inward skill, not a claim that the legless spider successfully produces a web. The next paragraph follows without a new source separator.

T355.The initial ellipsis is printed. The reading circumstance remains an italic bracketed opening in paragraph 2, with no intervening asterisk.

S1.Source editor’s annotationSame date: “November 11, Monday. St. Martin 1805. Mme de Cl—rm-nt-T—nn—rr—. At Villeneuve.”

T167.The former reads celle là as the rose, the first of the immediately preceding rose and lily and the feminine member of that pair. Papier peint is literally painted paper and can mean wallpaper; the translation preserves the manufactured surface without restricting it to a wall covering. The abbreviated name in the date annotation remains unexpanded.

T168.The printed paitrir is understood as pétrir, to knead, without changing the French spelling. Perhaps qualifies the bee’s rumination; the metaphor is not presented as a modern account of bee anatomy.

T169.The paragraph moves between fabric and light. The French lui and fui rhyme: the light shone and fled. Coupon means a fabric remnant, as in the Académie’s 1835 definition; the italic parenthesis judges that word too ample for the intended piece. Add remains Joubert’s instruction within the paragraph.

T170.The feminine pronoun is read as the truth of the preceding paragraph, now imagined as wearing a dress. Her and she preserve that personification. The fragment remains a separate paragraph within the same entry.

T171.The source’s feminine elle precedes the masculine plant name hortensia. She keeps the personification without silently making the French genders agree. Scale retains the musical and chromatic image; five colors is not changed into five musical notes.