Friday, April 2:
All sorts of toilet preparations for the journey, and besides that, indescribable concern over the two eldest children. I pay some calls and do some shopping.
In the evening R. vividly recalls the Easter scene in Faust, with the walk and the first meeting with Mephisto, and he reads it to me. R. is moved to tears, as he says, by every encounter with so noble a spirit. Admiration and amazement over almost every word; Goethe’s youth like a spring morning which brought forth everything in him, and in later life he was just the guardian of all these blossoms. He had to pull himself together to forget his distractions and return to himself.
R. says that the poem “Vanish, you arches” is a complete description of the process of falling asleep. Only a poet could recapture the memory of that.