Wednesday, June 26:
R. woke up just once, from a ghostly dream in which he was frightened by his double; I was worried during the night that he might have caught cold, but he is, thank goodness, well, and takes his spa walk with the children; then he continues reading Prof. N. I place open on his desk the 21st canto of Dante’s Purgatorio, which enchanted me yesterday with its interplay of dream and reality; the images it conjured up in me of the dreamlike quality of our thoughts also please R., but he feels it is all too far away from us in time, too remote, and this spoils the effect of the poem, since we cannot accustom ourselves to all these punished heathens: in what a completely different way does Faust move us, he says, though he adds that Faust is equally remote from our railroad age. For me these shadowy times, to which we stand in the same relation as D[ante] to Vergil, have an added fascination and a sublime horror; one is astonished to feel so attracted toward, indeed so much at home in, so alien a world. The sudden death of Obernitz, whom we knew, produces from R. the remark: “I feel a downright comic figure among all these dead people and the dead who refuse to lie down.” But one’s impressions become blunted, the good O., for example, had never dared express his opinion of R. to Princess B[ismarck]. “No more about the outside world, I find it horrible.” He feels sad that he has not left any pupils behind him. During the morning, as he sat in the summerhouse, he had been assailed by thoughts of his isolation in the world, and, watching our groom cutting the grass with a scythe, he had wondered, “When shall I be crying, ‘Senzi, Senzi’?” Fidi’s nursemaid was called Creszenz, and when he wanted anything from her he called out, “Senzi, Senzi.”
Saddened by these associations with death, I ask R., “Are you content with life?” “Not with this life, but with life, yes,” he replies. Miss Cartwright tells him that in England money is everything, and the money is all in the hands of the Jews. Bism. is said to have forbidden the election of Bennigsen and Lasker; R. laughs about Lasker and says, “He will soon find out what it costs to attack a Jew.” [A few words based on untranslatable word play omitted.] We listen to the blackbirds, which never stop singing, and I say I shall miss their singing. “Then I shall begin,” he says, “summer will do the composing. I am now thinking of the 3rd act, I don’t like thinking of the 2nd.” In the evening I stroll in the garden with R., he shows me the roses he particularly likes (I shall dry them) and regrets that the growers now seem to favor the unroselike colors. In the evening we read a little about poor N. (“it does me no great honor to be praised by such a one”), and I read aloud to R. the scene with the Khan in the Wandsbecker Bote; his “Surely he understands what he is saying” amuses R.