Friday, October 29:
Letter from Dr. Hallwachs; the first legal deed concerning our divorce is on its way. With the children; wrote to Judith Mendès. Thick snow outside, much brightness indoors. R. is very delighted with his uncle’s book on Erasmus. What a pleasant, warm tone literature possessed in those times, he says; so much youthful enthusiasm!
I read by myself about Cervantes’s life and am so terribly affected by his fate that in the evening I can scarcely take delight in his work, which is again splendid: the governorship and episode with Dulcinea.
Yesterday, when I glanced at a religiously inclined letter from Hermine, it made me truly melancholy to see to what extent the eternal and so deeply moving teachings of Christ have fallen into the hands of the exploiters. They haggle with the crucifix and eternally put the unsewn garment of the simple teaching up for auction. My thoroughly religious nature cannot do without the teaching, but cannot bear the manner in which it is conveyed!
R. reads me from the A.A.Z. some very excellent sentences written by the painter Pecht about the unworthy treatment of Semper in Saxony; this cry of indignation amidst the general indifference pleases me so much that I write Pecht a word of acknowledgment, but expect from him either no reply or an irrelevant one.
Great fright over R.’s fall from the ladder while arranging his library. At supper we discuss various matters from earlier days. “What would have happened if I had gone to live in Berlin at that time, as I wanted to?” “Who can say?” “Oh, it is inevitable that we, after being together for only a few hours, should have felt we could not do without each other,” says R.
I stay up late and consider until midnight how I might give R., on his birthday, a sign of what he means to me, to the world. R. asks what I am thinking of all by myself. “You will know in eight months’ time!”