Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of September 6, 1875

Overview

Preparations for Vienna raise ordinary but unresolved questions about lodging, while the Americans keep pressing R. for the promised letter and the narrator resists any public statement. On a long walk, R. watches a laborer at work and muses on the immense chain of material and labor behind art, concluding that only a select few can truly receive it; the evening reading of San-Marte and Guiot de Provins leaves him amused by the old poet’s wide wandering in contrast to modern travel.

Content

Monday, September 6:

Arrangements for Vienna - hotel or guest house? The Americans are plaguing R. for the promised letter, I am very much against a statement of any kind.

R. takes a long walk, comes upon a laborer sieving sand onto lime; R. reflects: lime, houses, furnishings, luxury - the way in which all things must proliferate, pile up, before a work of art emerges, and how can one speak of a national work of art? What does a stonemason like that get from the Ring des Nibelungen? Only individuals, the chosen few, can enjoy art.

The motto for today is Guiot de Provins’s “dans le siècle puant et horrible”; in the evening we read San-Marte’s introduction to Guiot’s Bible with much interest. R. laughs about the way people imagine that because of the railroads they now travel and get to know more - a man like Guiot, how far he wandered and how much he saw!