Leaves

Use in the book

The May 1833 leaves are nearly transparent, newly opened, and so tender that touching them seems dangerous. Yet Guérin and Élie pick beech leaves for food. He imagines the lives they would have had in sun and wind while his hand continues its ravaging. The unresolved small cruelty matters: sympathy does not magically stop use, and pleasurable conversation accompanies destruction.

Within the same entry, insect damage already interrupts the fantasy of immaculate newness. Later a leaf eaten down to its network of fibres becomes a miniature of Gothic architecture. Loss can reveal structure and beauty without ceasing to be loss.

Leaves are also especially responsive bodies. Rain gives each a small repeated oscillation, collectively turning foliage into a tremor; wind makes the cliff-watchers seem two leaves. In August 1834 the self curls inward like a cold-struck leaf. These transfers depend on observable delicacy and responsiveness, not simply on a conventional association between leaves and mortality.

Places to read

1. 9 May 1833 · ¶1Picking and tasting beech leaves coexist with explicit remorse
2. 9 May 1833 · ¶2Insect damage qualifies the apparent perfection of new foliage
3. 4 October 1833 · ¶1The eaten leaf’s vein network becomes a model for Gothic delicacy
4. 7 May 1834 · ¶1Rain transmits little oscillations through the whole leaf mass
5. 26 August 1834 · ¶1A leaf touched by cold models sudden inward contraction

Translation in this edition

The English retains parenchyma in the Josselin comparison and supplies no false botanical simplification inside the text. The supplied note explains it as soft leaf tissue, distinct from the remaining fibres and veins.

Use in the book

B82 does not isolate plants as a wholly different order of material being. Leaves are set beside hair, feathers, and scales and declared the same things. The statement makes plants available for a common physical account of growth and covering. It does not say that leaves have all the functions of feathers or that plants are animals in ordinary classification.

B77.78 presents a different aspect of foliage: persistence through the year in trees that also continue to bear abundant fruit. Here the adjective joins temporal steadiness to flourishing. It is not merely a label for a contemporary botanical group. The surviving couplet says more about the continued presence of leaves and fruit than about their internal structure.

These physical uses should be distinguished from the prohibition on handling laurel leaves in B140. A leaf can be a comparable bodily formation, a sign of abundant growth, or the object of a ritual restriction. The shared noun does not dissolve those contextual differences. The present entry centers on the first two functions.

Places to read

1. B 82Leaves are declared the same things as hair, plumage, and scales.
2. B 77.78The supplemented trees flourish with enduring leaves and fruit through the year.

Translation in this edition

The edition places B77.78 under the Purifications, but the section heading is an editorial arrangement. That location alone does not identify the trees as belonging to a reconstructed golden age or determine the physical cause of their enduring leaves.