Thursday, October 2:
Unfortunately the camomile tea does not work, and though R. calls it “calmatif” I am too sad to laugh from the bottom of my heart. R. wakes from a very bad dream, gets up, goes off to sleep again, only to wake up once more, this time for a longer period, and to read Hagen’s book. At last, toward morning, he falls asleep. Laughingly he remarks, “A doctor here would never order a bath and forbid beer—he doesn’t know what effect the former has, and the latter he likes too much!”
I am awake almost all night, tormented by ideas which, of no importance to me during the day, rise up alarmingly before me. I believe that his preoccupation with vivisection is much to blame for R.’s depression, and there is nothing coming to him from outside to refresh him; he says it is only when I go out that he hears enlivening news; I tell him what I hear in the shops about life in the town, all sorts of funny stories which amuse him.
In the evening he gives me Crito to read out loud, but this glorification of the state does not much appeal to him, it is not one of Plato’s best things. I feel moved by Plato’s love for his country and the way in which, despite the execution of Socrates, he weaves, as it were, a halo around Athens by showing how Socrates loved the city. And then the dramatic wit and the consummate artistry in the speech about the laws. I always find myself thinking about what he says. When I tell R. this, he says I am right.
Before whist a quotation from Nietzsche’s book in Hagen again leads to astonishment over this fall from grace; I believe that here was committed the one sin which cannot be atoned for—the sin against the Holy Ghost. No words could be more moving than those contained in this quotation.