Monday, December 23:
R. did not sleep too badly, but he complains of tightness in the chest and looks run down. He did too much yesterday. But at lunch R. is cheerful, though talking tires him; he laughs a great deal over the story of the death of the conductor Proch, who, shortly before his demise, read in a newspaper that he was dying: “Now I don’t know whether I should drink my coffee or not,” he said, and a few hours later he was dead! (R. asks whether he perhaps died of a “broken” heart.) He says at lunch, “It is really curious that both the Pommerania and the Grosser Kurfürst had to sink.”
We spend all day alone together, and a curious thing happens: looking for something upstairs in the Parnassus room, I catch sight of a volume of Hoffmann’s life and think to myself that R. might perhaps like to glance through it. When I go downstairs, R. tells me that he has just been reading Hoffmann’s biography. I: “How is that possible? It is upstairs.” R.: “No, downstairs, it is on my table, at any rate the second volume, which is what I read.” Our thoughts, dreams, desires, so interwoven that every moment seems like an intimation of eternity!
In the evening I read to R. from the biography and note in it that it was his uncle who visited Hoffmann; then, when the overture in celebration of victory is mentioned, R. says, “I played that as a piano duet with my uncle, I can still remember the allies embracing.” He also mentions the name Hoffmann assumed for it.