Saturday, December 11:
Very nice letter to R. from Prof. N. R. comes to my bed early in the morning to receive the orders of the day. If I am well, he says, he will dress luxuriantly. We decide on Knecht Ruprecht and the Christkind for Christmas.
He works and is satisfied; in Brünnhilde's scene with Siegfried in Götterdämmerung none of the themes from the love scene reappear, because everything evolves out of the mood, not the underlying thought, and the mood here is different from that of the heroic idyll of Siegfried.
At lunch, amusement over the Vatican Council, where they are said to have been unable to understand one another because of the differing Latin. Joy in the children; their jubilant hubbub on the stairs interrupts our table talk. I constantly thank the gods that they are well. R. tells me he cannot pray, but his feelings of gratitude take shape in him as an ardent desire for the destruction of the individual self.
How constantly I suffer about Hans! I should like to die before him, so that he might realize how every hour I suffered with him, through all happiness and all blessings.