Wednesday, November 27:
R. had a better night, he only had to get up once, had all sorts of dreams about travel, in which Fidi played a prominent role. Coming back to Disraeli, he says, "What we read yesterday interested me far less than that single conversation," then he gets heated about the assumption that Jesus was a Jew; it has not been proved, he says, and Jesus spoke Syriac-Chaldaean: "Not until all churches have vanished will we find the Redeemer, from whom we are separated by Judaism. But his ideas are not easy to grasp; God as the ending of the universe - that does not allow for a cult, though perhaps monasteries, in which people of similar beliefs could find a refuge and from which they could influence the world, from the solitary state - but within the world itself it is not possible."
We have to laugh over Disraeli's glorification of the Jews: "I have an idea what he is getting at," says R., "racial purity and great men; that ruling genius I dreamed about - only the Jews could produce him." Yesterday R. called himself a "tattooed savage"! (He remembered yesterday having seen coattails tugged in the House of Lords: Lord Melbourne was the object of it.) We talk about Rudolstadt, and R. recalls his apartment there; it had a couch stuffed with down, so soft that he has never forgotten it.
Around lunchtime I go to R., who first shows me something sent to him by a manufacturer of steel pens: "I like being given presents." Then he tells me he has written something he is pleased with: "I'll play it to you." We go into his room, and he plays me Parsifal's reply to Gurnemanz's question where he has come from ... R. says he did not sing or play it well, having had to start over again. But what does that matter when one's whole soul dissolves in bliss?
Springlike weather, sunshine, warmth. R. says he does not care for such unseasonal pleasures, one cannot enjoy them when one knows everything will soon be overtaken by death. R. works in the afternoon following his walk, and in the evening we continue reading Disraeli. He becomes wilder and wilder in his assertions, and everything not to the point is so superficial and vapid. We poor Germans are very badly treated. R. tells friend W. he is not going to write his retrospective article about the festival: he cannot exonerate the Reich, and so he would prefer to keep silent. As far as the artists were concerned, he would mention only the good things. He chooses a minuet from Armide as a change from the one from Don Giovanni. In the latter he praises the way Mozart captures the note of Spanish dignity, how with the repetition of certain notes he hints at a certain conventionality of behavior, showing it is being danced in Spain!