Saturday, December 21:
R. got up once during the night but was on the whole not dissatisfied with it. At lunch I notice, however, that he is very absorbed. He tells me he has been going through his manuscript: I did not yet know Gurnemanz's joy when he recognizes the spear. "He howls for joy, and the fifths I've got there, you'll be amazed!" ... R. is touchingly kind to Herr K., and Herr Jager comes for coffee, telling us quite a lot about Vienna.
R. puts off the Bach evening, saying he wants to be alone. Things are again brewing inside him, arousing my fears: may this terrible inner process not prove a strain on him! He says: "All I want now is to finish Parsifal, then everything will be all right. Let's hope it won't be a success and people won't insist on founding my school for me, for then I should be lost." Previously he told me that he had read Actors and Singers, and "I was vexed that I should be expected to say anything beyond that."
In the evening we are all by ourselves, R. and I. "Oh, how much good it does me not to feel cramped!" he says. "All talk with other people is an affectation." Each of us takes a volume by Goethe (Xenien), and we take turns reading to each other; R. is particularly amused by "Oh, were I but rid in my halls of Isis and Osiris." After I read to R. Goethe's poems about Indian idols, he says how natural it seems to him to regard animals as divine, how noble they appear in comparison with human beings, and more beautiful, too. "The human being with all his reason is just like that dog with many heads! ... Only in very rare cases can speech express the soul, and so silence is much nobler." A very cheerful, quiet evening, and R. looks well when we part.