Saturday, March 27:
R. well again, does not know whether he owes it to the medicine or to the rest he had yesterday. As I am sitting for my portrait, he comes and reads to me Schopenhauer on the subject of language; he is much taken by it and tells me he can literally visualize how Schop., while writing, suddenly saw before his eyes the people he was addressing, and flew into a rage.
In the evening R. reads to us more about language, and follows the reading with this remark: "Progress stretched from the birth of the human race up to the invention of a Sanskrit language. Progress is prehistoric, and when men lose the instincts which have brought forth languages, these then decline. Great men such as Pythagoras and Plato were not really progressive people; they went in search of a lost paradise, they looked back and yearned." When, referring to the Iliad and the Nibelungenlied, I say to R. how sad it is that, since our old legends are not connected with our religion, we are constantly dependent on foreign influences, he replies, "That is why music is the only thing."
A visit from Herr Tachard, conversation about Bismarck. Of the Italians, the educated ones, whom one comes across in the street, R. says, "They are like clowns who have lost their sense of fun." A game of whist in the evening. I dictate to R. a letter to the syndic.