Tuesday, April 22:
R. had to get up during the night and wander about, but not for long. He works while I and the children dust and clean up the main library. It pleases R. to see the children working in this way. It takes us almost the whole day, and R. walks in the garden; toward evening he does some more work in my room, and in the evening he reads to me Carlyle (on W. Scott); he is particularly pleased by what the English author has to say about popularity and greatness. Otherwise our conversation today mainly concerns Rameau’s Nephew.
On Sunday we talked a lot about the ever-decreasing quality of indignation: moderation—a necessary invention of the Israelites, who cannot vent their anger in foreign lands—has been raised to an ethical and aesthetical maxim. When we change the subject, R. says I ought to write for the B. Blätter; yet it seems increasingly absurd to me that a wife should become a writer; I see her as a housekeeper, a weaver, a sibyl, taking part in all creative acts, raising the patience of a beast to the level of a holy offering; but philosophizing, writing, arguing—less and less do I care for it; and if I am permitted to live as an individual, I want it to be only secretly in the memories of my children’s children. R. today recalled the impression which inspired his Good Friday Music; he laughs, saying he had thought to himself, “In fact it is all as far-fetched as my love affairs, for it was not a Good Friday at all—just a pleasant mood in Nature which made me think, ‘This is how a Good Friday ought to be.’ ”