Sunday, April 7:
“Recall the pledges that we plighted, recall the love we bear between us, recall the earth where we are one.” With these words R. releases me after breakfast. “I did not need the hypothesis of Christianity,” he adds after a while, “as Laplace did not need the hypothesis of God, to express the negation of the will in the Ring.”
We come back to the subject of Frl. Olden; a letter of recommendation from her teacher makes him thoroughly indignant, and he intends to send her a rude answer. Frl. Götz’s opinion, mentioned in the letter, that Frl. Olden would be particularly suited to Kundry, brings from R. the remark: “That reminds me of my mother, who once wrote to my sister Klara, ‘The baritone in Nürnberg has drunk himself to death—that would be just in your husband’s line.’”
R. works. He goes out in the afternoon; in the evening we read Ivanhoe.