Saturday, July 3:
Rainy day, and R. would have preferred sunshine for his work, because he has to rewrite Wotan's last words to Erda, which have turned out too "idyllic." The two doctors come and find things looking better; Siegfried's eye is improving.
Spent the day with the children; R. stays indoors in good and cheerful spirits. In the evening he tells me: "How happy I was when today I really felt what I enjoy under your protection! I took out a volume of Droysen and read the death of Pyrrhus, then I opened Schopenhauer at the chapter on music and discovered that, if I am ever to carry out my projected writings, I must link them to this chapter."
He added: "You never read the right things: you should read this history of Hellenism, which makes us aware of how at its dissolution this unique people was, as it were, returning to its heroic age; the things which occur in it could have come straight out of Homer. Everything so dramatic, so impassioned, so violent. And Sparta emerges again!"
Against his reproach that I do not read what he recommends to me I have to say in my own defense that, since becoming a mother, I have really had no more time for reading, and today, while reading Oedipus, I literally reproached myself for not going yet again to see how the little ones were getting on.
He reads me the death of Pyrrhus. We pass the evening in conversation; he is still delighted with the picture of Beethoven: "That is how he looked, this poor man who gave us back the language men spoke before they had ideas; it was to recover this language of the birds that Man created the divine art. But this is also the reason why a musician such as he is a being for whom there is absolutely no place in society."
His other pleasure came from the children, for whom he played something and who played around him, Lulu already very earnestly fascinated by the music. I tell him how shattered I was by the passage in Oedipus in which Oe. says to his daughters that they will never marry; his shame would weigh on them, too. "It could be otherwise," R. replies. "Since you bore me a son I know that I must live to a ripe old age. The fact that I have won you shows me that Fate still has something extraordinary in store for me."
I then tell him that I am resolved not to come out of my seclusion until it becomes necessary in order that the children may learn certain things. "Then we, too, shall enjoy the world," he said. You are happy now, my children; may God rain blessings on your more distant days! You, Lulu and Boni, will one day be to your father what I could never be; that is my comfort and my hope.