Cloud

Use in the book

Anaximenes’ weather account makes clouds through the thickening of air and showers through further compression. Xenophanes’ stars are clouds set on fire, extinguished by day and rekindled at night. The two uses show why cloud-language cannot be confined to the chapter on precipitation.

Places to read

1. I.31.1Cloud and shower belong to successive stages of thickening.
2. I.24.1n.1Ignited clouds explain the stars’ appearance.
3. I.22.2.4Cloudless brightness characterizes the Homeric divine dwelling.

Translation in this edition

The English generally uses “cloud” for both related nouns. The physical role follows the attributed theory: water-bearing material in one setting, fuel of a light in another.

Cloudlessness

Anephelos means cloudless. The Homeric description of Olympus quoted at I.22.2.4 excludes wind, rain, and snow and presents a cloudless clarity filled with radiance. Cloudlessness contributes to an image of the gods’ secure dwelling. It is a poetic description used in an argument, not a general observation about the weather at a terrestrial mountain summit.

Use in the book

Guérin studies clouds as moving forms whose relation to light continually changes. They can create a landscape in the sky, become flocks, open clearings, or retreat through diminishing shades toward the horizon. The descriptions are not merely inventories of fanciful resemblances. They examine edge, interval, perspective, movement, and illumination, often revising the scene as it changes.

Weather can also undo a simple association of brightness with happiness. August’s motionless grey veil brings welcome rest and makes distant sounds audible. Autumn fog rises slowly, revealing mountains and recalling an earlier beloved figure; the material clearing of a scene opens the passage into memory. In December the silent race of clouds contrasts with noisy waves beneath them.

By late 1834 condensation becomes a model of image-making. Imagination gathers the soul’s evaporations as air forms clouds, and writing records their moving shadows. This analogy preserves instability: beautifully formed thoughts can disperse before they can be possessed. Clouds consequently join the notebook’s minute observation of surfaces to its account of forms that exist only provisionally.

Places to read

1. 2 April 1833 · ¶1Clearings, lit edges, and receding ranks establish depth within the sky
2. 5 April 1833 · ¶1Cloud groups make an aerial landscape and recover a childhood manner of seeing
3. 14 August 1833 · ¶1A motionless grey cover enables repose and distant hearing
4. 1 October 1833 · ¶1Rising fog links present weather, earlier landscape, and unfinished recollection
5. 10 December 1834 · ¶4Condensation and drifting shadows explain the formation and loss of imaginings
6. 4 April 1833 · ¶1The clouds become invading heads and apparent competitors in a race, giving the returning bad weather a fugitive animation.

Translation in this edition

The April phrase faire paysage au ciel becomes make a landscape in the sky, preserving its transfer of terrestrial composition upward. In October, ténèbres blanches becomes white darkness: the paradox belongs to the French fog image, not to a translator’s embellishment.