Wednesday, March 20:
R. has a slight headache from yesterday, also a little nosebleed, but he works. At lunch he is very absorbed: “I shall have to start a new page, for everything has got to be Shipka’d.”
All day long he is absorbed, but we celebrate Boni’s birthday in cheerful style. “Then and now!” I say to R. Since he lunches with me upstairs, we drink Boni’s health from the gallery upstairs, while the children clink glasses in the hall below.
In the evening Eva reads a Grimm fairy tale, “The Girl Who Had No Hands.” R. says, “That she was turned out is common enough, but that she did not want to stay in her father’s house after her hands were chopped off is a very significant feature.”
In the evening I read aloud from Schopenhauer’s biography; everything about him from his earliest youth is profound and significant. We decide to let Fidi read only Schopenhauer as his introduction to philosophy, then after him Plato and Kant.
The painters Böcklin and Seitz Junior decline to make me scenery and costume sketches for Parsifal. The architect Sitte demands to hear the music first. Oh, Germany!
Friend W. comes to see R., who tells me, “When you are not there, I have no idea what to say to people, everything seems to me either unimportant or repugnant.”