Tuesday, March 26:
Spoke a great deal about Schopenhauer in the morning, his miserable life in Berlin, the magnificent twelve years of endurance. R. goes off to his “street girls”; he says, “They’re giving me a lot of trouble,” but yesterday he was pleased that he had now written over half of his work. I tell him that to me it seems like magic.
The mayor comes to see me and brings the revised contract; he says the secretary does not have the slightest doubt that the King will sign it. R. goes walking in the garden, and I go to the theater with Boni to see about costumes. R. continues working on his text and says he will have eighteen maidens, no more. No one in the audience will take any notice of the text, he says, but the singers sing differently and feel like individuals if they do not just have to sing senseless repetitions in chorus, and this adds to the general effect, as, for instance, with the song of the Valkyries.
Yesterday I asked him whether he was contented. “Infinitely,” he replied. This answer, and the emphatic way he spoke it, flooded me with a feeling of well-being, and with the memory of it I passed blissfully in the evening from waking to sleeping; he was resting quietly beside me, his “infinitely” stirred in my heart; all my sorrows seemed like departed spirits which would never return, and I enjoyed my moment of exaltation!
At supper he spoke of an earthquake in Lima, during which petroleum lamps fell over and caused an explosion. “So it’s no longer an act of God,” he says with a laugh, “but an act of civilization.” I: “But how can these people burn petroleum?” He: “You mean, in earthquakes they should at least burn oil lamps!” He has got a lot of pleasure from Lichtenberg; he quotes to us his thoughts about starving people in India and in our country [illegible word], talents for earth or heaven, stupidities in the depiction of the planetary system. Read the Schopenhauer biography, then the “By the Brook” movement of the Pastoral, played by R. as a piano duet with friend Seidl, a glorious, tender impression. “It is not at all too long,” says R.