Sunday, July 13:
R. had a good night, and in the morning he reads C. Frantz and starts on the revision of his article, with which he is quite pleased. In the afternoon we go for a walk; the weather is not good, but at least it is warm. Then R. holds his own “Angermann's” in the summerhouse with friends W. and Rub.; much about C. Frantz. R. would not feel able to write him an open letter, since there is a sort of crypto-Catholicism about him: “That's how it is with us,” “What a wretched state we are in when a man like C. Frantz has to resort to such things.”
Then he reiterates his thought about “human make-believe, God as truth through compassion.” He asks himself whether one should assume that Nature deliberately set out to produce this phenomenon, step by step. But even if one discounts time and space, he says, it has always been thus. The passages in the Bible which try to bring everything into harmony - this is bad, he remarks, but one must have something definite to hold on to!
In the evening R. talks admiringly about America and the American war, the only war whose aim was humane, and we jocularly discuss the founding of a new Bayreuth. He believes we are heading for a complete political breakdown, with social problems coming more and more to the fore, held back by wars. An hour of whist.