Wednesday, February 7:
Geneva.
Spring sun! — I sat on the seat outside the house — great warmth: first budding of the shrubs. On the right, in the firs, the finches calling: beneath them, Pohl’s grave.’! —
Day comes on. —
Or is it night? —
There rots my wife — ? there languishes my beloved! — And here? —
Spring! —
Day — Night. —
The Hellenes had a fine sense of the sanctity of night. The profoundest sense of it must have been revealed to those attending the great performance of the Oresteia of Aeschylus. This began in daylight: Agamemnon — complete human error — crime — desire. Afternoon: Electra — revenge — expiation — punishment. With the Eumenides dusk falls; at the end fully night: the young men escort the appeased, reconciled daemons of revenge in torchlight procession to their nocturnal place of rest. —
Now the sanctity of the night feeling gives birth to playful merriment also: fauns and satyrs tease each other by torchlight, jocular dismay and disappointment — drunks scrambling for resting-place. The world lightly sheds its burdensome seriousness, and — peace becomes possible. — Here sleep — there death! —
That was fine — : and it was at the approach of spring that they played it! —