Monday, November 10:
R. had a good night, but when he wakes up his nose is very red and swollen - we fear erysipelas! He works on his article. Prof. Zöllner sends him his book on transcendental physics with a very nice letter, and in this connection R. remarks on how a misunderstanding of Kant and Schopenhauer can lead to such aberrations as the assumption of a fourth dimension; ideality, he says, is difficult to grasp, and particularly difficult to keep in mind, and people are constantly losing sight of it. “If Schopenhauer and Kant were really understood, how could new philosophical books possibly keep on emerging?”
(Added on a later page, but referred back to this point: “R. calls the cone the nose of God, in contrast to the eye and the finger of God.”)
After lunch our conversation touches on the connection between color and key; R. says he knows someone who suggested that he should turn it into a system, but in fact he has never seen colors. He then tells us about Baudelaire, who very wittily translated the Prelude to Lohengrin into colors, but he was not a musician. And how could this theory be reconciled with transposition, musical pitch? Everything lies in the relationship of one key to another, he says. Much then about Baud and Champfleury, those two delightful oddities. “Just as the divine principle can be seen as a negation of the world, such people are a negation of Paris, but only possible in Paris itself.”
He goes for a short walk, revises his article, and, when I visit him at work, tells me delightedly about the children and the dance he has been watching: “My heart overflows when I think what happiness I have been given.” (Added on a later page, but referred back to this point: “He says, ‘Let me be a child, and you be the same - cannot say be a donkey, since I am asking someone else to be it with me.’ ”) But his cold is getting worse; he does indeed joke about it, saying his nose is swelling up like a hippopotamus's, but both he and I are worried. The doctor prescribes inhalations of marshmallow tea - these clear his brain a little, and he is able to laugh heartily over the beginning of Keller's story Die missbrauchten Liebesbriefe.
(Added on a later page, but referred back to this point: “He calls the bedroom the ‘well-tempered clavichord room,’ since the sound of the children’s practicing comes to us in a muted form. During a merry game of whist he says to Lulu, ‘It’s only for your sakes I look after myself; if you weren’t all here, Mama and I would know what to do.’ ”)
Our mood is a curious one, calm and pleasant, and it is blessed by our being entirely alone together, our friends having been invited to the W.’s. But I am beset by unutterable concern when I notice at the whist table how very run down R. looks. Whether it is due to pain, the fact that he is forbidden to take snuff, or the air in the room, only God knows, and God also knows how I manage to bear so much worry, however much in His abundant goodness He thinks of me - oh, who can measure, describe, or even guess at the feelings within my soul! R. talks to me again during the evening about Othello, who, he says, becomes downright repulsive. I: “That is perhaps what Shakespeare wanted.” He: “Wanted - rubbish! He had no choice - that is how he saw it.” “And Desdemona, the silly goose - not to guess what was tormenting him, always bringing up Cassio!” “That is how he had to show her naivety and innocence.” He finds Desdemona the purest and most complete female figure in Shakespeare, and mentions her exclamation “O, these men, these men!” The fact that we were alone together today brought home to me the utter bliss of his company - no discord, no irritation, just love, even in the midst of worry!