Thursday, June 24:
Woke in the night and thought out a plan by which R. would give a reading of his Nibelungen in Munich and afterward tell everyone what we were trying to do, why we went away, and how we had now been forced to abandon all our plans. In the morning, under the influence of Sol, I found this idea absurd.
I told R. about it and he said he had also once considered it, but afterward the mere thought of to whom he would want to speak had frightened him off; such a thing might be possible in Paris, where it would make an impression and have some effect, but in no town in Germany would he find an audience for anything like that. All one could do was to shed light from afar like a planet and not try to intervene directly.
Then he adds jokingly: when I am well again, he intends to enter his Goethe age; he has really made up his mind not to let things upset him any more. If only I would not let things affect me so! The greatest wisdom, and often the greatest humanity, is to let things take their course.
Then he said, laughing, “It irritates you terribly that I cannot be happy without you; you want me to be cheerful and well, but you wish it could somehow be achieved without your help.” I had to laugh and to say, “Yes, certainly that is so.”
He goes to his sketches, and I begin my letter to Hans. When he comes in to lunch R. notices my emotional state and reproaches me for having written. He says I should have desisted, out of love for him. When I offer the letter to him to look at, he says he does not wish to read it.
In the evening R. brings along an article by Cornelius about Genelli, which disgusts us both very much; R. says he throws in Dante, Homer, the Bible, as if they were nothing, and nothing comes out of it but false judgments; to stick strictly to the subject, nobody does that any more.
In the afternoon a visit from Countess Bassenheim.