Friday, October 25:
R. did not have a good night; in the early hours he had a curious dream: he had performed something, and was about to descend from the platform on which he had done this when some wild animals, attracted there by him, appeared; they licked his hand, but at the same time bit him and stopped him from going farther, while I was pleased that the animals were paying homage to him in this way. Telling me this dream, R. says, “So you think animals are particularly fond of me?” I: “Yes, you are closer to Nature than most other people.” Despite his bad night he goes to his work, saying to me, “It is a curious life one leads with these figures, a sort of ghostly life.”
I start my day with the most melancholy of reading material; Glasenapp has sent me a copy of R.’s letters to Damrosch! Oh, God, how to avert this hatred for, and these wicked feelings against, people who suddenly appear before one’s eyes? With work; the children help - may I be as useful to them as they are to me! I am able to conceal my feelings from R., but, curiously, Daniel comes into my mind, I talk of him, saying that, if he had lived, things would perhaps have been different for him and R. R. says I bore the loss of them both in remarkable silence: I believe it is only with him that I can talk about them. R. writes to Herr Jauner about Jager. Pleasing news that Hans’s concert in Berlin, consisting of Beethoven’s last five sonatas, was very successful; R. says it is quite incredible.
In the evening I say to R. that I told Malwida in a letter that we must be very thankful for having found this patch of earth here for ourselves and our children: it would be a crime to think of Italy. He says I am right, and in reward the heavens today pour rain in buckets over us! And bad weather depresses R. In the evening we look through a nice book, written by a Dutchman, Voltaire musicien; it is accompanied by a very nice letter. R. gets Herr Kellermann to explain electricity to him, and feels less and less desire to concern himself with science. R. says: “I wonder when they will discover something to extract ore from its underground shafts? And whom would the socialists send down for it? Probably the princes and the aristocrats.” After that we finish Luther’s letters, with the same feelings.