Friday, January 17:
R. slept well; our conversation in the morning is devoted almost exclusively to the story; he leaves me with the greeting “Schiller, before he was raised to the aristocracy” (this because friend Gl. wrote that he calls our busts the Riga Goethe and Schiller!). Around noon, as I am dressing, I hear the cherished voice calling from upstairs, “Cosi - I want to play something to you.” I fly into his room, he sings to me Gurnemanz’s words Nicht so and all the rest up to so weiche jeder Schuld Bekümmernis von dir.
After lunch we talk of Naples, whether to go at all - it is so lovely here, he says. Over coffee I tell him about the orthopedist who was here to see the children, and he remarks that I am doing too much; this makes me laugh, but he continues: “Things are going so well for me that I want to work, in order to earn my happiness.” But in the afternoon he feels pain in his chest and decides after all on Naples for next winter; he says how quickly the 10 years of our happy life together have flown. When he goes, I call out after him, “I think only of you!” He: “And I only of myself, for that means you.”
In the evening we finish “Ursula,” I doing the reading since he has slight chest congestion. We remain enchanted to the end; R. says: “Oh, if I could only find a contemporary like that in the musical field!” Fortunate Switzerland, where such a writer is still possible! Zwingli, because of his quarrelsomeness, feasible only within a narrow community, impossible to imagine Luther sword in hand in the general “mishmash” of the German empire.