Consolation

Use in the book

The immortality note gives consolation one reason for a necessary opinion, while expressly adding the teaching of justice. The scriptural reflection opposes searching Scripture for history to finding poetry and the spirit of piety, then adds patience and consolation with an attribution to Saint Paul and Nicole. The added pair widens the earlier account of reading’s effects. Neither witness says that consolation alone establishes a proposition’s truth.

Places to read

1. I, p. 309, entry 6, ¶1Immortality serves consolation and the teaching of justice.
2. II, p. 803–804, entry 10, ¶1Scriptural reading is linked with patience and consolation.

Translation in this edition

The English translation distinguishes the verb console from the noun consolation and keeps “Add” as Joubert’s instruction. The note records a scriptural parallel while leaving Nicole’s commentary unlocated; this lexicon does not supply an unverified source identification.

Use in the book

Poetry initially preserves what remains pure and gives the speaker his consolations. Friends and letters later perform a related work: they reach the suffering person from outside the enclosure of his pain. Eugénie’s letter does much good at the height of a crisis, but Guérin immediately adds that the crisis still had to run its course. The limitation is part of the evidence, not a reason to deny the letter’s value.

Nature offers another consoling presence, sometimes narrowed in Paris to a single lilac. Its moving leaves seem to answer an embrace with murmured words. The scene makes consolation a perceived reciprocity: what has been addressed appears to respond. The notebook itself is similarly imagined as a compassionate companion, and receiving another’s trust is consoling in turn.

After Marie’s death, however, no consolation dares approach the most extreme regret directly. Guérin surrounds it with memories whose mingled voices gradually slow painful thought. Relief is indirect and temporary. Later even nature’s former soothing correspondences fail, showing that consolation is a contingent event of relation, not a resource always available on command.

Places to read

1. 20 January 1834 · ¶1Nature’s beneficent vertu penetrates and tempers dangerous exaltation: the word names effective soothing power rather than an ethical accomplishment.
2. 12 June 1833 · ¶1Eugénie’s letter helps during a crisis without preventing its necessary course.
3. 20 April 1834 · ¶1Consolation becomes reciprocal when the loved companion also rests on the weaker person.
4. 7 May 1834 · ¶2The lilac’s imagined response gives a bodily form to nature as consoler.
5. 12 February 1835 · ¶1Memories approach grief indirectly and moderate its pace for a time.

Translation in this edition

The English “consoling souls” for âmes consolantes at 7 May 1833 · ¶1 makes consolation a quality of presence. Douceur is not uniformly rendered “sweetness”: “gentleness” and “soothing” may better express care or the tempering of pain. The “soothing, beneficent virtue” of fields and woods at 20 January 1834 · ¶1 is an efficacy that calms: the literal English preserves an older sense of virtue easily missed today.