Tuesday, February 11:
I write to my father and attend to a few matters, but am otherwise almost exclusively with the children; the nursemaid from Leipzig is leaving, and I am not sorry. Fidi’s first sleigh ride.
In the evening R. dictates to me a letter to the people in Graz, putting them off. Quite by chance he comes on Diintzer’s book and is delighted with the explanation in it for the indifference with which Faust, after Gretchen’s death, continues to live: “behavior which seems shocking, until one reflects that God has no further part in him, that in consequence he is denied the divine feeling of crushing remorse, and marches toward his liberation by death merely according to the dictates of Nature.” I am impervious to all explanations, since, when I believe something, I accept and understand it all intuitively, without the need to analyze it to myself.
We are both tired, and since our return I am always having wild dreams; last night Rus was biting and harrying me, I went for help to R., who was asleep, he had an eye ailment, and huge tears were falling from his eyes. (R. has written to Herr Am Rhyn.)