Wednesday, July 31:
The little girl did not sleep, but R. had a good night. The doctor calls Loldi's condition a slight attack of rheumatic fever. I overcome my concern and weariness sufficiently to be able to discuss with R. in detail religion and music and their direct influence over the will; when I tell R. I should like to see this more clearly, he says, "Pen, paper; I'll write it down for you, dictate it to me."
This leads us to Die Meistersinger; he is pleased with the poem, with the invention it reveals. "Music and religion are directed at the will, but since compassion is aroused, the individual is raised above himself to the species level, and to this extent the world is equivalent to God."
I stay at my daughter's bedside; R. "bungles around," as he puts it, having found the ending of the novel so absorbing. He teases me all day long, says I ought to be wearing a hair shirt; he himself disdains the austerities, prefers oysters (Austern). I tell him that through him I have been made healthy for all eternity. Not just healthy - no, if there has come into me a single spark of kindness or any other quality which people treasure or gods bless, then it has sprung from him and will return to him in the blessings of love!
Bad, raw weather, but my little girl is looking better; I sit beside her and read Opera and Drama, R. plays some music, I write to Hans about the future of the two elder girls. Profound discussion with R. about original sin, the transgression of love which Sieglinde is made to realize; then about Veronique, whose "Non" in reply to the placatory bishop R. finds splendid; in the morning we talked about the women in the final part of Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahre; as R. laughingly says, "the happiness of discovering that Therese was the child of a frivolous relationship and can now be rescued from her milk pails!" "Everything as if sketched in pencil."
In the evening R. goes into the garden and soon calls me out to see the starry sky flickering gloriously above us; the Milky Way, surrounded by other stars, stretches over our house like a benediction, the wain looks as if it is being drawn along in triumph; "In Dante the nine Muses point to it," I tell R. "A cornucopia of blessings shines down on us." R.: "I no longer have a wish to address to the stars." I: "But I have one."
Back indoors, talking about being happy, R. says, "Either I am, or I can never become so." He talks about the impossibility of geniuses emerging from the world in its present state, then about our children, so loving and so loved! ... We bid each other good night with indescribable feelings of belonging together.