Thursday, May 1:
R. slept well only till 4 o’clock, then he became restless, had to get up and apply compresses. The weather is cold and raw; three blackbirds have frozen to death! R.’s morning work was the perusal of a Wolz. manuscript for America, which R. will have to sign and which seems to him very immature. We talked a lot about Fidi. R. tells me that at the age of ten he wrote sacred poems with a friend (Lauterbach) in a mood of religious ecstasy. The aim at 12 was to produce Der Treischuts.
The sky clears, and R. and I go for a long walk with the two girls, Loldi and Eva (Boni and Fidi in bed), and the two dogs, to the Students’ Wood and back on the road past the powder magazine. During it R. recalls Tribschen and says, “We should have tried to keep it for ourselves and make a pilgrimage there every year for a few weeks, for it was a good place - the storms were still raging, but they did not harm us.”
In the evening R. plays my father’s Hamlet with Lusch as a piano duet and says it aroused the impression of a disheveled tomcat lying there before him. Then we start on Carlyle’s Playwrights; his judgment of Grillparzer very good. Coming back to Hamlet, R. says: “Musicians should not concern themselves with things that have nothing to do with them. Hamlet offers nothing to musicians.” We continue speaking about this subject until quite late, when an embrace and a blessing both part and unite us.
End of the twelfth notebook of the Diaries. The thirteenth begins: “The notebooks are piling up; the volumes which previously sufficed for years now hardly suffice for six months. And yet I feel as if I myself were less and less present. Will I succeed, my children, in conveying the picture I want to preserve for you? Will our love live on in you? ... I do not know, but I shall continue.”