Sunday, February 16:
R. had a bad night, disturbed by ugly dreams about money. I myself wandered with him in a dream along a wooded walk and felt a painful start when he said to me that he was beginning to feel old. Waking up, I said to him, “Please don’t leave me just now — I have had such a bad dream.” He: “But I am just coming back!” He had also experienced some fear of ghosts downstairs. At lunch we laughed about it, and R. talked of his terrors as a child, which had never been of ghosts, but of lifeless objects suddenly coming to life: “I should have been frightened of this siphon — of a chair — of anything.”
In the evening we finish Plutarch’s discussion for the benefit of our friends. Yesterday R. prefaced our reading by saying: “I have read Balzac — good — and Keller — good — and Gogol — good — and Turgenev — good — but what barbarians we are! It was only the ancient world which brought forth truly great men; in comparison, all that is really effective is Christ and the Sermon on the Mount, the denial of the world; in the acceptance of the world only the Greeks are great.” Astonishment at the long lifespan of the Greek spirit: 600 years later Plutarch still speaking as if he were living at the same time as Socrates — and how do we regard Wolfram von Eschenbach? Delight in the comparison with the mirror, though otherwise “The Cave of Trophonios” proves somewhat wearisome. R. looks at his old edition of Plutarch, “transferred with incredible effort” into German, and speaks of the timid and petty character of the Germans at that time.
My spirits are overshadowed by learning that R., who went out this afternoon but gave it up on account of the violent wind, showed some blood in his saliva, not from the lungs, the doctor says.