Monday, November 17:
Just as Posa [in Schiller’s Don Carlos] can exclaim, “All the same, life is sweet!” when he has sacrificed his own, so, too, do I, after experiencing all the awfulness of it and recognizing its tragedy, exclaim, “All the same, it is sweet!” At our morning separation I exclaim it.
“It must be so!” R. says to me in English. Life is parting; at all such outpourings of our hearts I feel that death is, as it were, the unfolding of the yearning blossom of love, life the winter frost before which it must close in order to survive. When one lives, love dies; when one loves, life dies!
Frau Heim has sent me photographs of Zurich; R. goes through them with me and shows me his window in his various apartments; I gaze on them all with emotion and see the pear tree he climbed on the first morning of my stay at the Asyl. At lunch he talks about museums and says, “I have never visited the museum in a town - I never had time for it; I have never seen the Green Vault; I was only once in the Louvre, with a Mlle Leplet, from whom I hoped to get some money - Kietz had told me about her.” As lunch ends, he voices his delight in a leaf: “Like a tiger skin.” He expresses his delight at length, and since I cannot see the leaf, he plucks it for me.
He talks again about America, saying that he might still perhaps go there in order to make his fortune, but then he would not come back. He believes that if he had settled there permanently with his family, the Americans would probably have stood by him, but not now, when all he does is demand contributions for this place. He also talks at lunch about the study of history in childhood and where one should begin, because I had asked him whether one should start with specialized history. He thinks, from the beginning of mankind, the first migrations and the return to the region of the Ganges, then the figures of Semiramis, Cyrus, in order to arrive at the Greeks; and what they themselves have thought out and imagined is more important than what really happened.
In the evening we read Don Quixote, and the noble speech to the weeping old convict reminds us of Plato’s state! ...