Monday, April 1:
A slight sore throat forces me to remain in bed. R. is also depressed. Prof. Nietzsche takes his leave. Yesterday we tried without success to make a table move; we had spoken about it at lunchtime. R. explains it as a matter of will power, I as fraud.
R. comes frequently to my bedside and relates, among other things, how, from his very earliest childhood, the thought of being great had possessed him, inspired probably by his mother’s declaration that his father had wished to make something of him. He said he could remember once having written to a friend, inviting him to his home so that they might together read the exploits of the great Napoleon. When he had written Rienzi and Der fliegende Holländer he asked himself doubtfully whether he would ever belong among the chosen few great men. This feeling had diminished with time, but he said he could imagine that in some people it persisted and induced them to try everything, even without the proper qualifications: on no account be a nobody!
Toward evening I get up, but am very weak. R. is also very run down. Herr Schäfer sends a program from Hans’s concert in Munich with a vignette, a goddess of victory pointing to the building.