Sunday, September 21:
R. had a rather restless night, and he seems to me to be run down. The problem of vivisection affects him, and his letter is keeping him occupied.
We make an attempt to watch a Chinese man doing his tricks here in the Sonne, but the terrible music drives us out immediately, after R. has shouted, “Do stop it!” and begun to whistle himself. We have to laugh over this attempt to take a look at the world for once.
In the dusk we, R. and I, sit in the salon, and our conversation leads us to death. To die well, he says, is the greatest happiness; I observe that to die well one must already have died in spirit, so that death is then hardly an event, and I maintain to R. that there are many things of which he understands nothing, since genius has no part in original sin. He: “I live like a sort of animal.” I: “Yes, in innocence.”
Whist in the evening, R., Boni, and I, after R. has awakened from a short sleep with renewed signs of a cold. But the whist is very merry; contrary to his usual wont, R. has luck with the dummy, and a curious, harmonious gaiety settles over our quiet evening.