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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

January 27.

Transparency. — False thoughts take away words’ transparency. Transparency does not deceive. — It does not corrupt languages; on the contrary, it restores their luster, their purity, renews them, polishes them anew.

Celestial clarity, and from the upper regions.

Glory. More beautiful to desire than to possess.

The old custom. All the bells rung at the funerals of young girls and young boys carried off by an early death. And the saying “it is their wedding!” as if to excuse this pomp.

Wherever a body, an object, enters, light is diminished and transparency ceases to be pure. Without that, the body or object could not be perceived. One may say that everything with some sensible form displaces, in the place it enters, a portion of light whose volume equals its mass, as a solid entering water displaces a mass of water equal to its volume.

For morality, another kind of clarity, or rather another kind of distinctness. Here there are impulses to be given to the will, not contemplation to be offered to the understanding. Fire and ardor are needed rather than light.

January 29.

If the poet’s finger passed its phosphorus into it.

January 28.

(while walking.) Customs. And one must adore and pray according to the customs of one’s childhood. God wills it, and necessity too. For...

January 29.

Not that grammatical clarity, that false light. False minds have at their disposal a certain degree of light that they have stolen from true ones and with which they counterfeit their power or excellence.

One thing alone in poetry cannot be stolen from it: its continuous light.

Opinions are a thing that catches light, — true meteors.

Self-love, content and grateful, gives thanks to providence.

January 30.

Patience and affliction, courage and death, resignation and necessity ordinarily arrive together. Indifference to life arrives with the impossibility of preserving it.

T98.The facsimile prints accented dès. The English reads the fragment contextually as clarity from the upper regions; the anomalous accent is retained in French rather than silently changing it to des.

T99.The funeral bells are excused as wedding pomp in the reported saying. French son refers to an individual deceased boy or girl; English singular their avoids assigning a gender while the preceding sentence names both. The fragment does not assert that the deceased had married.

T100.Sensible means perceptible to the senses. The source first makes the displaced light’s volume equal the object’s mass, then describes a mass of displaced water equal to a solid’s volume. Both comparisons are preserved as printed, without correcting them to modern physical quantities.

T101.Clarté and netteté are kept distinct as clarity and distinctness. Morality is concerned here with moving the will; contemplation belongs to the understanding. The final fire and ardor contrast with light.

T102.The If clause remains unfinished. Phosphorus preserves the substance or bearer of light named phosphore, without replacing it with an abstract inspiration. Into it retains the unstated destination of y; its reads son as the finger’s, while a reference to the poet is also possible.

T103.The Latin notation is translated in its original body position, within parentheses and in italics. The childhood customs govern both adoration and prayer. The closing For is unfinished; no argument or location is added.

T329.The printed date returns from January 29 to January 28. Enlarged facsimiles confirm both dates; source order is retained. The opening of the divided coutumes is partly clipped and restored.

T104.Faux jour is a misleading light or illumination. False minds and true ones preserve Joubert’s opposition; their in the final clause refers to the true minds whose power or excellence is counterfeited.

T105.The source changes from plural opinions to singular a thing, then returns to plural meteors. Catches light retains the ignition or illumination of s’allume; the comparison is not turned into a claim about modern astronomical composition.

T106.Self-love itself gives thanks in this personification. The source does not decide whether its gratitude is admirable or self-serving; the English does not substitute vanity or a moral verdict.

T107.Mal is read as suffering or affliction in the pairing with patience, rather than moral evil. The repeated arrival links each response to the condition that occasions it.