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← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

YEAR 1805

Strength (in literature) is a quality that must be hidden or clothed.

A beautiful old age is, for all the men who see it, a beautiful promise. For each may conceive the hope of it for himself or for his own. It is the prospect of an age one flatters oneself one will reach. One likes to see that this age has beauty.

February […].

Take heed: it is humor (bad humor) that makes them fruitful.

When one wants only reason to be heard, one must wait for it to speak; and it does not hurry, it rushes nothing because it takes heed of everything.

Intelligence lets its clouds disperse when it wants to see the light. Ages in which hearts are filled with troubles and minds full of darkness slow its action.

To set aside with care the multitude of words.

Ideas! Who has any? We have approvals and disapprovals. The mind operates with its assents or refusals. It judges, but it does not see. Everywhere in books one sees will; one does not see intelligence.

Delalot fills his mouth with gravel.

Those people complain ceaselessly that there are not enough books. And people grow angry if any are made.

In him, style is not “the expression of the soul,” but the expression of humor.

And, if I dare say it, he asks for a public honor for the schoolboy he has whipped. His rods fall from his hands.

“He (God) takes hold of man through that by which he formed him.” The expression is very beautiful. “He knows that the senses and imagination are a part of his being: he does not disdain to reign over the imagination. He has filled his prophets with poetry.” How well all that is said! This man is ridiculous in being a true Tertullian in literature, but at least he sometimes has the talent and the beauties of the priest of Carthage, inflammable and lively as an African. — Tertullian writing on poetry...

It does not follow that lines of verse will not be beautiful because they contain a figure called antithesis. On the contrary, antithesis and even wordplay will be praiseworthy when found in a beautiful line, that is, when they can serve to express clearly something good.

T117.Beautiful, beautiful, and beauty remain repeated rather than being varied into graceful, happy, or admirable. His own retains les siens without narrowing the term to particular relatives.

T118.Humor is used in its older sense of temper or disposition, with bad humor explicitly supplied by Joubert’s parenthesis. It does not mean comedy here. The same English word recurs for humeur in the later contrast with the soul.

T119.The repeated it follows reason as a speaking and attentive faculty. Waiting for reason is contrasted with rushing; nothing is recast as a rule to delay every practical action.

T120.Approvals/disapprovals and assents/refusals remain two separate pairs. Judging is contrasted with seeing, and will with intelligence. The repeated seeing is kept in the English.

T121.The gravel is kept literally in the image of a mouth filled with it. No anecdote or named ancient orator is added to explain the comparison.

T122.The first subject is those people; the second French on is indefinite. The English does not insist that the complainants and the angry people are exactly the same individuals.

T123.The unnamed critic asks for an honor for the pupil he has whipped; the rods then fall from his hands. These actions remain in their printed order without supplying a motive or identifying the pupil.

T124.The printed la formé is read here as l’a formé, with the apostrophe absent in the source. The English reads the evident sense formed him, while French keeps the anomalous text. Through that by which retains the relation between how man was formed and how God takes hold of him; the next quotation names senses and imagination. His being is read as man’s, while his prophets belongs to God. The unnamed writer’s comparison with Tertullian and the African characterization remain Joubert’s judgment, not an added biographical claim.

T125.Il n’est pas dit is rendered it does not follow: the mere name of a rhetorical figure cannot decide a line’s beauty. The English preserves the affirmative judgment that antithesis and wordplay can serve a clear expression of something good.