Friday, August 1:
R. had a bad night, the subject of vivisection on his mind. He tells me in two parts about a curious dream: waking up the first time, he says Pohl told him his wife was earning him so much money, 17,000 marks annually; then R. goes to sleep, wakes up again, and tells me he has just dreamed that Pohl’s wife is earning all this money with acrostics, which she composes for newspapers.
Is this sleeplessness due to moral impressions or to physical causes? Yesterday R. told me in great agitation what Herr v. Schlor had to say about the present policy of compromise - it drives one to despair!
But in the morning R. is tolerably well again, and when he looks at me on our first parting and feels that I am looking rather languid, he puts new strength into me, saying, “She shall never weep!” A visit from Buonamici at midday, much pleasure in his gay and lively Italian character; in the evening he plays to us Beethoven’s Variations in F (Op. 33?), which R. calls a “lovable work” and which he plays quite splendidly, bringing out the motives so beautifully and shaping it with such refinement that we are truly entranced by it.
Then R. gets Rub. to play some passages from Parsifal, the Flower Maidens and the entrance into the Temple (3rd act) with the altered bars; when he hears the chords on which Parsifal receives the robe of the Knights of the Grail, R. comments on the awful change which is now taking place inside him, now that everything has been decided; I tell R. that it arouses in me the feeling that Es ist bestimmt in Gottes Rat. R. agrees and tells me that this theme expresses the awful disgust with life he was feeling at the time he wrote it; I tell him that what I find so curiously magnificent about it is its lack of sentimentality, its almost Lutheran character.