Friday, October 31:
R.’s night was rather restless at first, but the second part was better. When I come up from my bath and sit down beside him, he says I am so surrounded by brightness, whereas he by darkness - “thou in light, I in shadow” - this quotation brings us to Starnberg, all the suffering and all the high spirits, the jubilant surging of love. He recalls his poem and the feeling he expressed in it that he would never possess me: “It turned out all right in the end,” he exclaims.
Yesterday the inquiring Frenchman wanted to know which of his works meant most to R. R. said he did not know, he soon forgot all about them, perhaps he could say Parsifal, since he wrote this in the most congenial circumstances.
R. joins with me in deploring Hans’s foolishness in not seeing Lulu, saying that no other female person could be such a comfort to him. He works on his article and feels he has now said enough - he mentioned yesterday that he intended to cite Saint-Saëns’s works as an example of how instrumental music has now gone astray, but he has decided not to do so, since it would be taken personally, as an act of harshness toward a friend. “When I get too carried away,” R. says, “I make a swift change of direction” - and that is indeed very characteristic of him, his spontaneousness, even in his reflective moments, and his inability to “tell fibs,” as he himself calls it.
At lunch our conversation touches on Goethe’s theory of colors, and when Herr v. St. says it has long been superseded, R. says, “What interests me is the intelligent man who discerns something, not the number of learned discoveries.” When mention is made of Eckert’s sudden death, our young friend observes that it was a pleasant death; R. says no, a pleasant death means dying at a ripe old age, aware of it as the true aim of living.
R. goes for a walk, taking the dogs with him, but complains about Brange, who looks at him “like a mother of God” but, once she picks up a scent, abandons him without mercy. At supper we come back to Goethe, reminded of him by a picture of Prof. Oken in the Illustrirte Zeitung; R. says Goethe did not like him: “He was a fine monsieur.” But he can understand his dislike of Fichte and says with regard to ideality: “It is exactly the same as with the valve trumpet - hardly was this facility discovered when all melodies were played with it. The same with ideality: hardly had Kant discovered it when everybody started making nonsense of it.”
R. is delighted with Luther’s goblets in the Illustrirte Zeitung, and that leads our conversation to this great man. Another item about the Communards brings from R. the opinion that a plebiscite should have been held; R. then tells about having experienced a vote of this kind in Switzerland (canton Glarus); from that subject to Sulzer, whom R. mentions with great warmth, finding the outcome of his austere life - the inevitability of his downfall - very moving. Talking about large cities, R. tells our friend, who likes Berlin, that he himself cares only for Paris; this city had always interested him, and when the streets he knew so well were being demolished to make room for the new opera house, he had been too vexed to be able to watch it happening.