Monday, January 5:
R. again had a bad night, and I am literally afraid of being together with him; talking about the affair oppresses him as much as not talking about it. I see him literally succumbing, and there is nothing I can do! The “cloak of misery” has been donned again, God help us; and in addition there are material worries about my little bit of capital, which my mother still withholds from me, and the interest on it has not yet been paid to me.
I do not get to the house in the morning, and for that reason my visit in the afternoon is all the longer. A strange task amid so much gloom and hopelessness, to wish to, or rather have to, make it comfortable.
In the evening read Luther, then also in Claudius about the Last Supper, very fine, though he has not quite understood Luther either, and gives unity precedence over truthfulness. We laugh to think how disagreeable Luther must be to people of refinement. Splendid comparison of God with a printer: only in the life beyond shall we see the true text of life, here on earth the letters are the wrong way around.
R. says that when he was walking through the Platz des Gymnasiums he had asked himself what his life would look like without me. All this absurdity, he says, this meaninglessness! Nothing to grasp hold of...