Thursday, April 11:
In the margin: “R. cried out loudly in the night; he had dreamed that my father was trying to kill him with an instrument of torture, and I withdrew with cold eyes to the adjoining room, having been instructed by my father to guard the door!”
Our morning conversation leads us to the myths of Nature; the interpretation of Elpenor as a premature spring held back. R. says, “That is what gives Homer’s poetry its stamp of eternity that every episode has a mythical quality; it is not, as in Ariosto, for instance, an arbitrarily invented adventure.”
R. is annoyed at the bad penmanship of people today, who write just for themselves and never for others and then they talk about education. Of himself he says, “The only solution, when one has to write unpleasant letters, is to write them very slowly and beautifully, so that the technical aspect of the matter absorbs one and helps one over the content.”
The loveliest of days; in the morning R. signs 311 certificates of patronage, helped by Lulu. After lunch, coffee in the garden, then went out with R. He is delighted with his Schiller and Lessing, which he has had newly bound; what made him choose mauve and green for Schiller was a childhood memory of a performance of Die Braut von Messina, in which Don Manuel, played by Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient’s handsome husband, appeared in mauve velvet and green silk, so that these colors have become in his mind the symbol for Schiller, for gentle manhood. All his impressions of Schiller have been boyhood impressions.
I take a bath; Fidi comes to say good night and is frightened. R., to whom I tell this, says that when as a child he saw the sky reflected in a bowl of water he was both horrified and fascinated. For him it was like an earthquake, a fluctuation of all known laws; he did not know where he was.
Conversed in the evening; the performance of my father’s Testklänge and the friendly review of it in the newspaper makes us wonder how it has come about that hostility toward my father has ceased. R. thinks such things disappear with time; I believe it is because my father no longer stands in anybody’s way, he no longer plays the piano, conducts, or has any interest in any position, etc. (Letters from Marie Schl.)
Between this page and the next: a piece of paper containing some dried flowers and the inscription: “Last violets from Tribschen.”