Friday, August 2:
R. had a good night and tells me the dream he had about two lambs, crouched curiously on top of each other on a ewe's back. "That will bring good luck." At breakfast he laughs heartily over Strauss's expression that "history does not know what to do with a Jesus without sin." He is much amused by the absurd association of history with this phenomenon, and the way of expressing it. He works, and beforehand reads the Ducs de Bourgogne; in speaking of which he says to me, "In history it is all the same, reverses or victories, until some great personality comes along, then it becomes absorbing." I say goodbye to Herr Levi, whose feelings toward us arouse complete sympathy. Speaking of the B. BL., R. said to Herr Levi, "I am interested only in complete truthfulness, I seek no quarrel with anybody, but I shall state my opinion of everything that comes into my mind, sparing nobody."
We talk a lot with R. about the attitude of the Israelites to mystical matters, closed doors; then, talking about his own relations with his contemporaries, R. says, "I admit that I no longer wish to sit in an attic and starve - history is not worth that much to me." He opens the glass door, the wind whistles, summer is gone. And the starlings are flying home; we see a whole flock of these returning migrants and watch them. He laughs: "A bad climate, and all this for an artistic ideal!" ... Then we part, after he has told me, "The only thing I still wish is that you become stronger and I get rid of some of my ailments, then things will become even better and nicer between us, and we shall attain a state of complete ironic happiness." He means by this that we shall look serenely on our complete detachment from the world.
In the afternoon Herr Kellermann, sent by my father at R.'s request to act as piano teacher and copier of scores. A pleasant person with refined features, already bearing the traces of life's hardships. "We must fatten him up," says R., who thinks he must be a descendant of the Spanish occupation during the Thirty Years' War, since he does not look at all like one's idea of a native of Nürnberg, "and at that time no one could be certain of his birth."
A walk with R., an east wind brings us a clear sky, but, says R., there's a world's ending in store, since the barometer is falling at the same time. I: "That will be the completion of Parsifal." We speak also about my last conversation with Herr Levi. He does not seem fully to understand Parsifal, and I tell him that R.'s article theoretically bears almost the same relationship to the poem as his words on music (the loving woman) and on drama (the man) in Opera and Drama bear to Brünnhilde and Siegfried. Through this R. comes to Nietzsche, of whom he says: "That bad person has taken everything from me, even the weapons with which he now attacks me. How sad that he should be so perverse - so clever, yet at the same time so shallow!" In the evening R. goes through Palestrina's Stabat Mater, which has just been published, in order to show it to me; it makes a fine impression, but R. feels that if one were to compare it with the painting of that period, a Titian, for instance, one would have to call it a beginning. I now say farewell to this notebook, in which, I believe, I have been more detailed than in the others. For whom am I writing them? Will they give Siegfried what I intended - a portrait of his dear adored father, for whom no love, no admiration is too great? ... I do not know, and yet I will continue to "far tesoro" [make a treasure trove] of my memories, even if only for myself!
[End of the tenth notebook of the Diaries; the eleventh begins: "In his honor, since all happiness has come from him. Every thought, every heartbeat is his! Dead in all else but to live in him!" At the top of the page: "Begun on August 4, 1878."]