Wednesday, October 8:
R. had a good night; still busy with the revision of his letter, and he also writes to the people in Straubing. Some newspaper reports about the scorn with which doctors are treating our movement upset him greatly, and he says he could bring himself to devote all his energies to it and become a socialist in addition.
In the afternoon I read Hamlet to the elder girls, at their request! R. gets somewhat impatient that Lusch has not yet finished copying his letter, for he wants to make some additions to it. He is very taken up by it, indeed worn out. I suggest a game of whist.
As reading material he has E. v. Hagen on the end scene of Das Rheingold; today he tells me that he has not grasped the difference between "eternal" and "infinite" - "eternal" simply means outside of time. Otherwise it would be nonsense to have spoken of "the end of the eternal gods." Recently he observed that in the Edda and the ice-licking cow Audumla one could see something like traces of Haug's theory (the poles).
At supper he said that on a recent walk he had had an amusing encounter; he had spoken to a stonebreaker, and the man paid scarcely any attention to him, but when he saw Rubinstein with him, his face broke out in delighted smiles, and it turned out that the latter often gave him a few coins.