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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

Our hair, for example, is something almost animate because it comes from the body, which is living, and our flesh almost has intelligence because it touches our soul, which is spirit.

November 22.

What man knows only through feeling can be explained only through enthusiasm.

Half-light is charming, for it is daylight tempered and diminished. But twilight is less so, for it is not yet daylight. It is only its beginning or, as one very well says. “the point,” the point of day.

The devil is a scarecrow — and — if scarecrows are of no use in the hempfield of vices against the birds called desires...

When one is content to understand by halves, one is content to express by halves too, and then one writes easily.

Three things are necessary to make a good book well: talent, art, and craft, that is, nature, skill, and habit.

November 23.

And just as care is needed to make a true verse with this meter, care is also needed to make only prose of it.

Does God wish us to love his enemies? — Yes. Why?

November 24.

I. A better language has better opinions. — And all my stars in one sky. — All space is my canvas.

II. Stars fall from my mind.

Through temperament (in music), one joins dissonance to consonance to make a new chord from them, and to achieve this one takes something away from the regularity of the one and the irregularity of the other.

No one can make a newspaper as well as a man of wit who is incapable of doing better.

November 25.

Stars without scintillation. And indeed truth is deeply hidden; one must dig to find it.

T190.Enthusiasm retains the stronger possibility of inspired or elevated feeling, not simply eagerness. The repeated only marks the two limits of knowing and explaining.

T191.Crépuscule is morning twilight here, as not yet daylight and the following pointe du jour indicate. Point preserves the metaphor within the usual expression for daybreak. The unexpected period after says follows the French after bien.

T192.Chenevière is a hempfield. Against interprets the scarecrows’ relation to the birds called desires; the conditional is left unfinished, with both intervening dashes.

T193.The two three-part lists remain parallel. Industrie means resourceful skill here, not industrial production. Well and good preserve the repeated judgment in bien faire un bon livre.

T194.This meter is not identified more precisely in the entry. The English preserves the claim that care is required in both directions, including to produce only prose.

T374.The inline Roman I and II begin the two physical paragraphs of one dated block; there is no intervening asterisk. The second clause of paragraph 1 remains verbless; the third has the finite verb est.

T195.The compressed dative me and de l’esprit are read as stars falling from the speaker’s mind. An alternative construction is stars of the mind falling to him. The entry’s images are retained without equating the stars with a specified kind of thought.

T196.Temperament is the musical adjustment of intervals, not personal disposition. Joubert’s description of joining dissonance and consonance is retained; no specific tuning system is named. The source’s masculine l’un and l’autre follow feminine nouns, so English keeps the one and the other without adding named referents.

T375.The masculine l’un and l’autre are retained after the feminine dissonance and consonance; no referent is silently supplied.

T197.Journal is read as a newspaper or periodical, in the context of writing and criticism, rather than a private diary. The sentence makes the writer’s inability to do better part of the paradox.