Friday, July 4:
Fine weather again at last. R. works; I am with the children in the garden. After lunch, conversation about Siegfried and Brünnhilde: the former is not a tragic figure, since he does not become conscious of his position; there is a veil over him after winning Brünnhilde for Günther. He is quite unaware, though the audience knows. Wotan and Brünnhilde are tragic figures.
In the afternoon I read Saint Paul and am much affected by the greatness of this being. To be sad in God’s, not the world’s, sense of this word, how moving this doctrine is! A serene disregard for all worldly things, silent and deep sorrow over one’s guilt! Saint Paul’s submission to the command of the Jerusalem church to cut his hair and take the oath, the Nazarite vow, sets the example of how one should respect the commandments and enter the church in a spirit of Christian love.
I am much moved, and tell R. it is the book of a man accused of heresy which has put me in such a religious mood. This makes him laugh. The bust is beginning to look quite good. Then a little walk, and in the evening reading. R. is pleased with “the Saxon soldiers,” as he calls the blue of the sky and the green of the trees.
The chapter about Rüdeger moves us into admitting that this second part of the Nibelungenlied is superior even to the Iliad, with its tender depiction of a devotion to duty which, as one reads it, utterly breaks one’s heart.
“You should have married a god,” R. says to me, at which I observe, “Well, I did!” As he goes into his workroom he says: “Now everything has a meaning, my books, my desk, because you are here with me. When I think of my earlier moves, the despair with which I arranged everything!” “Your first wife would no longer be young enough for you now,” I say to him today. “My dear child, if things had remained as they were, I should be very old by now.”