YEAR 1806

January 1.

The passions that are in the mind and the ambitions of the body present two horrible displacements to our attention.

He is right (Mr. Debord), we know how to jump, but we no longer dance. We no longer even know what dancing is; we no longer have the slightest idea of it.

January 2.

As true lovers of music are not those who swoon over roulades.

January 3.

To illuminate obscure points; and they, obscure known points.

All the difference there is between a little girl and a doll. Nature needs time to form the little girl; art needs none or almost none to make the doll.

January 4.

“The human mind,” they repeat endlessly. The human mind?... And souls? human souls? — Truly, Delalot is right: “Do not ask them... As if souls mattered when minds are in question...” (Journal des Débats, January 4.)

Delalot — excellent in polemics, for he has the kind of bile that causes this talent. This bile in his mind etc.

Critics who do not know books and politicians who do not know the world.

January 5.

The confidence their reputation inspires increases the pleasure certain works give our mind.

(Journal des Débats, article A.) “Reputations made.” How many books indeed whose reputation is made would not gain it if it were still to be made!

“All old men are despised by the factious.” An excellent observation! Why? Add: by the ambitious.

Of the distrust (literary) with which one reads certain works. Its effects.

A woman’s remark about Louis 16: “He had only virtues.” And indeed he had only virtues. He had no beautiful qualities.

January 6.

Your talk smells of ink.

One may say this of all those half-clear, half-obscure words that say only half of what one means, that come to the mind and with which the mind is content only when attention is as though glued to the paper and consequently half obscured. Thus, since these words would not naturally come to the freely working mind outside the study, they do not come, outside the book, to the memory of the reader left to his meditations.

Of the style that smells of ink. That is, the style one has only with pen in hand. Style made of words that seem to have come from the inkwell rather than the mind. For the mind never has them when it is free and occupied with peacefully explaining its ideas to itself. Thus, outside the discourse that contains them, these words seem strange. They do not exist in the world, but in books, — subsisting, having use, service, and utility only through their linking — they may for a moment satisfy the reader’s attention by a certain aptness, but they cannot naturally gain access to his memory. Half-clear and half-obscure, they would bring it only a cloud, only a formless figure: and it loves clearness. Since they were born of the inkstand, their only ground is paper. Books written this way are books that must be made again.

This talk smells of ink — may also be said of the discourse of a man who has taken what he says from books and who speaks and thinks less than he recites.

There must be in our style (or in our written language) voice, soul, space, open air, words that subsist all alone and carry their place with them.

The style that smells of ink is the one that comes only when one writes and never when one thinks and speaks only to oneself.

I like to write nothing on paper that I have not said to myself.

January 7.

“...seemed to us more wisely than forcefully written.” A journalist’s style. How insignificant. If the journalist said “more forcefully than wisely written,” would he think he was praising or blaming?