Wednesday, July 23:
R. again had a restless night, but this does not stop him from going to his work - he says it is the last thing he will ever write. At noon, when I go downstairs, he is playing things from Die Folkunger; I do not know what to make of all these reminiscences mixed with glee-club choruses, but I am reminded of a friend who once saw a photograph of her cook in one of her own most elegant dresses!
After lunch, the following news report leads us into the most dismal of conversations. “How can one continue practicing art after that?” he exclaims, and talks of a tour in behalf of the dismissed workers, but then he says with a sigh, “We are too tired.” It makes us think again about the poor miners: never mind what madness drove them to their terrible deeds, is not our first duty to help these poor people? Instead they are shot at - oh, God, what a world it is! “And I,” R. exclaims, “feel like an utter fool with all my plans.”
As if to set the seal on all these sad thoughts, we receive news in the afternoon that the municipal gardener, a splendid man who resourcefully took over the care of our garden following our recent upsets in Wahnfried, has suddenly shot himself. [A newspaper clipping enclosed; see notes.] Young, cheerful, active, seemingly without a care, a friendly, helpful man - yet he, too, changed, a mystery, and the plants now blooming in the garden, which years ago he laid out too, expound the mystery to me, and the trees shake their tops!
R. today read Carlyle on Rousseau, and he quotes to me the pretty remark, “The nobles did not know what to do with Rousseau, but he knew: he had them beheaded” (French Revolution). Books about ghostly apparitions, written by professors; R. says, “Really, the Germans are imbeciles.” The day before yesterday, when we were talking at lunch about death, I said I always feared that with the loss of physical strength we should also lose our moral strength and set a dismal example of lack of courage, whereupon R. said: “All I fear is that I shall babble nonsense about the past; a lot of stupid stuff, as the brain becomes confused. And that’s why it is right what people say - that a good death is the greatest of blessings.”
Toward evening he tells me I am in for a surprise, but he will not say what; then I hear him working on Parsifal. “Familiar sounds,” I say. He: “And some unfamiliar ones” (entrance into the Temple, 3rd act). In the evening a very lively game of whist with the children - how children, with the obligation they impose on one, always help merriness to triumph! R. says of Lusch, “She is the cleverest person we know here.” (R. is starting proceedings against Herr Roeser.)