Diotimos Reading Desk

Tap the page, move to the top or bottom edge, swipe down, or press Tab to reveal reading controls. Use the arrow keys or swipe sideways to turn pages.

← ExitThe Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Volume II

Reading language

Mr. Hochet and Mme de Sévigné.

July 27.

The three worlds: the terrestrial, the celestial, and the poetic, which partakes of the other two. In the last, everything must be painted so that vice appears more hideous and virtue more beautiful than in the terrestrial world. As for purely material objects, those whose nature or arrangement makes them fit to raise man’s soul must predominate there.

July 28.

Friendship among them is not always a feeling, but a strong, stable, immutable resolution, a devotion like that of the soldier to the cause he defends and does not know.

July 30.

In this century, people like neither simple good sense, nor wit alone, nor sustained reasoning in literature. They want more than good sense, better than wit; as for reasoning, they are weary of it, they distrust it, for it has deceived everyone and they remember. An adorned and wise imagination is the only merit that could give a book value.

If superstition is so formidable, if it is natural to man and inevitable for most men, one must inoculate it by giving children a religion.

August 1.

To think of God is an action.

August 2.

May heaven preserve them from being weighed in their scales!

Of them all, he is the one who has best made a path into these precipices.

That means you invite me to go astray and fall into bottomless precipices.

Those who never retract love themselves more than truth.

August 3.

— and who look at a bad painting with respect, and a good one with delight: this is the most praiseworthy and, I will even say, the most honorable disposition in which an honest ignorance can find and show itself.

(At Issy.) The music and painting of the streets. Their importance.

August 4.

Intellectual regions, minds that are their inhabitants. If I describe a chair, a tree... But if I describe a mind, or discover a fact in the history of this invisible world, a single feature of what happens there, — all events there are a justice, truths are its laws, morality its itinerary, metaphysics its description, thought its language, order its necessity and the only one to which one is subject there, felicity the common and universal condition. Such is this world’s supreme beauty that to name well what is found there, or even to designate it accurately, suffices to form a beautiful style and to make a beautiful book.

T37.The passage distinguishes good sense, wit, reasoning, and imagination. More and better remain different demands. Could follows the printed pût without silently substituting a present can. The imagination must be both adorned and wise.

T38.It refers to superstition, which is introduced through giving children a religion. The inoculation image draws on deliberately introducing a milder disease: the Académie’s 1798 inoculer entry describes induced smallpox as milder than its natural form. The translation retains inoculate it rather than reversing the metaphor into removing superstition.

S1.Source editor’s annotationA notebook, dated August 2, 1806, bears this title: “Marivaux, on style. French Spectator, vol. 2nd.” Quotations and approving comments, like this one: “All this is as true as it is subtle. And all that follows is very solid...” Finally: “One can say that Marivaux thus candidly taught the journalists who were his enemies how they ought to have censured him. Note. Some of his other remarks on style are written in the small notebook July and August 1806.”

T39.May preserves the wish expressed by the inverted subjunctive. The people referred to by them and their remain unnamed; no group is inserted from the neighboring apparatus. The printed August 2 heading makes this a separate entry although no asterisk separates it from the August 1 sentence.

T40.Beaunier quotes a separate notebook’s title and approving comments, including Joubert’s reference to a small July–August notebook. French Spectator translates the title here without claiming an established English edition. The ordinal vol. 2nd keeps the printed 2ond. Note translates Joubert’s Latin Nota. The quoted dates remain apparatus evidence.

T253.The new printed date establishes this unit immediately after the August 1 sentence, without an intervening asterisk.

T254.The source prints the baseline ordinal form 2ond. and the unhyphenated celle ci. The nested cahier references and their dates remain part of this single apparatus paragraph.

T41.The path is praised for how well it is made while leading into precipices. The following separate entry retains the invitation to stray and fall into bottomless precipices. No author is supplied for the unnamed he.

T42.The initial relative fragment remains. Respect for a bad painting and delight in a good one are distinct responses. Honest ignorance retains the unusual pairing rather than replacing it with a named social class or a judgment of expertise.

T255.Two vertically stacked printed separator marks precede the date; they mark one boundary, not an empty added entry. The opening dash and relative fragment are retained.

T43.The initial regions and inhabitants are noun phrases. The repeated If clauses break into the assertion after the dash without an added conclusion. A justice retains une justice; morality, metaphysics, thought, order, and felicity keep their distinct roles. The only one refers to necessity.