Monday, February 26:
A night of bad dreams. I go for help to R., who, curiously enough, was just dreaming that something had happened to me.
He works; I finish the 3rd act of Siegfried.
Over coffee after lunch R. says after a short pause: “Where was I just now? I was on the road to Possendorf - which I so often walked in a mood of gloom. Yet those were my productive, lonely walks, and it is strange how certain things are linked in my memory with the themes which came to me then. With ‘Ich flehe um sein Heil’ in Tannhäuser, for instance, I always see a fence just in front of the big garden in Dresden, where this theme occurred to me.”
I: “You also once told me that a theme in Die Walküre was connected with a certain walk in Zurich.”
“Yes - curiously enough, for these external things really have nothing to do with it; living impressions, as far as creation is concerned, are somewhat like the box on the ear which was given in earlier times to the youngest member of the community when the boundary stone was set, so that he should remember it.”
In the evening dancing lesson, and later Schopenhauer.