Sunday, December 28:
Toward midday, when we are once more all together, including two cripples! R. reads the story to us, the moving story of the smugglers [newspaper clippings enclosed of a story by Friedrich Axmann entitled “A Mortal Enemy's Revenge”], and says it shows the divine spark in human beings! Yesterday evening he read to me some passages from poor Nietzsche’s new book, and E. Schuré’s saying about “nihilisme écœurant” [“nauseating nihilism”] came into his mind. “To feel nothing but scorn for such a noble and compelling figure as Jesus Christ!” R. exclaims indignantly.
He continues with it today and reads several more things (about Faust, for instance) which are horrifying. In the evening R. reads to us his article for the New Year, so serene in its melancholy, providing consolation in a way only a genius can.
Then he finds a volume of Chopin’s preludes on the piano; having played the 4th (in E Minor) he remarks disapprovingly that an ambiguous chord has been interpolated at the end, as if to create a shock. I seek to excuse it by saying that this sketch is an attempt to reproduce something like a strange natural sound, but only long afterward, when he is lying in bed, does he say, “A natural sound - that is very good, but it is precisely these which one must try to reconcile with our laws of harmony.”