Thursday, November 1:
All Saints’ Day. “I do not just love you, I am immersed in you!” R. tells me. He is able to work. In the afternoon I go with the children to lay a wreath on the grave of our old friend [Dean] Dittmar, recalling as I do all our deceased: Daniel, Blandine, sister Rosalie, R.’s mother, every one of them. R. comes to meet me.
In the evening R. reads Sophocles’s Electra to me; while listening, one ought not to think of Aeschylus’s Choephoroi, and the play around grief, arising from the false news of Orestes’s death, has an unpleasant effect. “It is unworthy of a great artist,” says R., who also calls the tutor’s narration “a fine piece of Italian opera” - but the impression is terrifying, and its truthfulness, overcoming all artificiality, quite overpowering. Human beings confront one another with the wild, naive cruelty of animals and inspire dread and awe.