Monday, March 3:
In spite of the long walk yesterday, R. did not sleep well. I am very despondent about it; Boni is also not well, and the children’s behavior is causing me worry. God knows how I shall ever complete the tasks confronting me. I reflect constantly on the matter.
In the morning over coffee we discuss Goethe’s Iphigenie and her un-Greek character. R. tells me his uncle Adolph had told him she was more Greek than Euripides’s - “but,” says R., “she lacks naivete; the absence of music and the French conventions made an appeal to the understanding, explanations of some kind necessary, and these, in order not to sound crude and prosaic, governed the choice of words. I touched on this in my introduction to the reading of Götterdämmerung.”
R. works on his essay; I go with the children to the Feustels’ to arrange or settle various matters in connection with R.’s birthday. R. has things to do concerning the new house. In the evening we read Menzel’s new book about the intrigues of the Jesuits - it is alarming and incomprehensible that such evils have been able to take root here as they have. R. attributes it all to the bad years following ’48.
In the evening R. and I tease each other about our French, and thus a problem that has threatened to grieve me profoundly has been turned into a joke.