Friday, June 21:
R. had a very bad night, horrid dreams, congestions, an error of diet no doubt the cause. He does not drink his waters. He visits my class, where everything is going well, the children very good; then he goes to the summerhouse, reads the Bhagavad-Gita, and then reads to me a fragment from it which I feel could have been written by him; he, too, is quiet in deed, active in repose; he, too, creates free from desire. It seems to me that these sages kept a closer contact with the thread of life than the mystics, though these move me more; the former are sages, the latter saints, as I see it.
In the afternoon R. reads to me first the joke about N., with much laughter, and then the beginning of the Bhagavad-Gita. “How advanced they were!” he exclaims. “The Greeks in their philosophy were always bound by the law of cause and effect, they always saw things materialistically. Here, in the law of reason, one finds all those things which guide a great general, often without his knowledge. And what a conception it is!” R. writes a few lines to Frau Materna, recalling her great zeal; in the morning he thought of his sister Klara, the singing soul,” as he was singing something from Euryanthe — he had often heard her singing it. A thundery afternoon, R. is glad, content to remain indoors. Anniversary of my arrival in Starnberg, memories of that event, also of the first performance of Die Meistersinger: “Then we staged something else.” At supper he rescues a spider, “out of self-interest,” as he says; he then recalls the “class” (the children and the dog). “Ah, that was a spider at night.” Walk with R. in the garden, pleasure in our home. Early to bed.