Wednesday, August 23:
Good morning, my dear? — Yesterday I visited the children. But merely saw Boni and Isolde. Isolde was asleep, but woke up at once and had a mind to cry: I stopped her, then she gave me a laugh. Strange to say she reminds me of a sister, i.e., an ideal sister for which the possibility has always existed without so far being realized. The purely-sisterly, proto-mother-related! It may be that I, never having had any children, am able to recognize the related only under the concept of sisterhood. — Boni was very beautiful! She’s going to be an unusual child. —
I didn’t go into your rooms. But I could see your bed just as if you had just risen from it. —
How much longer are you going to stay away? A very, very long time, I suppose. —
The Gypsies have not impressed me favourably. Artificially cultivated barbarians; not complete nature, not complete art. Their music, half arranged, with barbarously dilettante mutilation. Not all that we enthuse over, out of revulsion at German philistinism, is worth it. All that is good for a bout of intoxication, but we ought to be above being intoxicated. Your father as much as me. It’s pretty, this éljen, Räköczy etc., — but those are by-ways, reversions, foibles: I’m not insensitive to it but I avoid it. Tears and laughter! Good, on the mirror of the deep lake, as a delineated world: but the shallow lake bottom is soon surveyed: hiding oneself there is no escape. —
‘On Sunday, on Sunday, at early morn, my darling wrote me a letter forlorn.’ Where does a tender German folk song like that come from? — The Gypsy doesn’t know what to do with it: heard from the depths of the lake, the world is mirrored in it! —
Oh, I’m so different from everyone! — From where now are my Joys to flow? — ]