Suffering

Use in the book

An excerpt about Adam gives pains the role of respectful warnings before the fall; Joubert comments on the surprising personification of these supposed modes. Elsewhere he distinguishes happiness as the feeling of a good soul from simple pleasantness: affliction and even remorse need not exclude it. The opposite possibility remains real. Pain can disturb reason so severely that a person prefers a greater loss to the present sensation. The horse escaping the spur by plunging into a precipice gives that disproportion a physical image. These are different arguments about pain, not a command to seek suffering.

Places to read

1. I, p. 446–447, entry 6, ¶1Quoted pains become active poetic beings in Joubert’s commentary.
2. II, p. 679, entry 2, ¶1Sorrows may coexist with goodness and happiness.
3. II, p. 778, entry 3, ¶1Pain disturbs judgment and changes the scale of feared losses.

Translation in this edition

The English translation renders douleur as pains or pain in the bodily and disturbing uses, but as sorrows in the comparison with joys. The damaged November happiness passage retains unresolved French residues; the lexicon does not complete them.

Misfortune

French: malheur.

Malheur is distinguished from weakness in a partisan comparison of supposed Jansenists with their critics. Tenderness toward weaknesses can coexist with insensibility to misfortunes, while severity can accompany compassion for undeserved suffering. The unnamed groups and historical religious label remain Joubert’s; the lexicon does not authenticate a general account of Jansenism.

Places to read: II, p. 710, entry 3, ¶1.

Use in the book

Suffering determines not only what the diary says but when it can be written. In March 1833 Guérin explains that pain has left too little intellectual freedom even to observe itself. The absence of entries is consequently part of the record of affliction. Yet he also imagines a capacity to bear pain developing in proportion to a particular trial, and later gives suffering a sacrificial value when he feels incapable of earning merit through action.

These consolatory interpretations remain contested by experience. In June 1833 he denies that the soul hardens under repeated blows as the body supposedly does; injury may sharpen susceptibility. In June 1835 small occasions consume energies that might sustain immense burdens. The problem becomes one of misdirected proportion rather than sheer weakness alone. He distinguishes pain arising from life’s incidents from pain in life’s substance, a distinction that prevents practical improvement from solving everything.

The metaphors vary accordingly: knots constrict, wounds reopen, elements ferment, tiny punctures drain life. They organize a phenomenology of suffering rather than furnishing a medical case history. Guérin’s intermittent recovery of confidence is as much part of that phenomenology as his declarations of helplessness.

Places to read

1. 3 March 1833 · ¶1Pain disables both writing and the observations on pain that the writer imagines he might otherwise have made.
2. 28 June 1833 · ¶1The soul, unlike the hammered body in the comparison, grows more susceptible rather than harder.
3. 7 December 1833 · ¶1Suffering is interpreted as an ascent toward heaven for souls unable to rely on active merit.
4. 22 June 1835 · ¶1Small irritations consume energy out of proportion to their size, overturning the assumption that greater loads always hurt more.

Translation in this edition

The supplied “inward suffering” for souffrances morales at 3 March 1833 · ¶1 avoids implying guilt. Its “affliction” for mal also prevents every occurrence from becoming a claim about evil or physical illness.