Wednesday, August 16:
Good morning, dear wife. Again somewhat better. I am going to take care of myself now so as not to get a fresh relapse. — During the night I stayed awake for hours with the light burning. All sorts of things went through my memory and several times I couldn’t help laughing out loud so that Franz, who sleeps close by, woke up. God, the things I thought about! Can’t now remember anything at all of it any more, whereas of a dream earlier I have a clearer recollection. What is waking, what is dreaming? —
Now let’s see how it goes today. —
Oh how grand the Rama poem becomes, and ever finer! — Really, merely to secure for oneself the right mood for such a thing one must be able to withdraw from all the vulgarity of the present. That costs total effort, and at the beginning one thinks it won’t work at all: the incomprehensible excesses of the introduction, for example, one feels like yawning and jeering at. But just go on: at last it dawns on you! What sort of a world that is, and how it is built up and executed! A work of art to marvel at — against which a modern novel seems like a newspaper article: I am into the second volume. It is all alive, sounding and moving around me.
Oh, Rama is divine! How grand, how vast everything becomes for me at having to deal with such people! — A glorious drama stands there before me, different from all others! But who is to make it?
Rama with Sita and Lakshmana marching into the jungle — who would not like to be Rama, who not Sita or Lakshmana. —
It is almost the finest thing I know! — Divine Land of the Ganges! —
Rama: the ‘dancing’ Queen Mother!!— — Lakshmana: — Fate — Rama: Lamentation
the ‘licked at’ crown.