Sunday, November 2:
R. had a very disturbed and bad night. A bath restores him somewhat; at breakfast we talk about the laws our friend described to us yesterday; R. says it all seems to him so childish, the most we could expect from it would be coffee machines in which the coffee would grind itself!
As he leaves, he tells me he has discovered that all virtues are negative except for fellow-suffering, for the suffering is positive - whereupon I say that is exactly what I wrote to Lusch four weeks ago! After we have parted, we meet again, when he has found my All Souls’ Day flowers. “I am Webia,” he tells me, “I am the ‘Urlogtrygia,’ spinning together all the strands of relationships. But at lunch he chides me for thinking so much of All Souls, saying he has only one soul. He goes out, I visit a widow, and when I return home, the skies are alive with indescribable colors.
I walk around in the salon; he, having seen me return, comes in: “You All Souls woman!” I put on my white dress for the first time since May 22. R. is pleased.
We have sent our friend Stein to Munich to see the King. We play whist with the two girls and then start to read Keller’s Das verlorne Lachen; the felling of the oak tree has a shattering effect on us both, and a little later R. says, “Yes, we Germans owe our downfall to the fact that we cannot be tradesmen.” Shattered though we may have been by the episode of the oak tree - such things are rare, R. says, even in the greatest of poets, such as Schiller and Goethe - we are equally amused by the parson’s sermon, which we can scarcely finish for laughing.
Yesterday, when I spoke of death by opening one’s veins, R. said, “Arteries - the arteries are the hexameters, the veins the pentameters, in which the blood drips melodically.”