Wednesday, June 23:
R. had a good night and is looking well, but on his left nostril he has a small growth with a black center which worries me, although it has already been shown to Dr. Schron. R. also seems to me to be preoccupied. With his work, perhaps?
During the morning I read a few of my recent diary entries, and I fear that I am wasting my time! Apart from his remarks, it all seems to me empty and dead. Will the children be able to recover even a single memory from it? Is my “I” not always standing in the way, hindering full appreciation? Not to speak of the things that are beyond description! ...
R. and I drive into town to fetch the letter, miss the streetcar after a wait outside the door, during which the old witch again makes something of a nuisance of herself. In the carrozzella R. tells me about a dog which, sold to someone in England, escaped in Dover and swam and ran back to its former master in Aschaffenburg! ... “And its master,” says R., “will have seen that just as an extra burden, will have sent it away again! This is what is contemptuously called ‘doglike devotion’!” [In margin: “The first time R. said, ‘I wonder if its master sent it away again?’ On the second mention he was sure that he had.”] “Yes, one must not take dogs too lightly,” he says gloomily. I: “Are you thinking of anything in particular?” R.: “Yes, of home.” Then at last I speak Brange’s name and tell him how she died, not of pining. He remains gloomy, shut up within himself, and at last asks me not to keep watching him; it makes him uneasy.
The letter is given him straightaway, and in a more cheerful mood we walk to Dreher’s, where Herr v. Stein joins us. A man from Bologna, completely different in both speech and manner, is offering perfumes for one franc; we buy some and are pleased to have encountered him. Cheerful journey home.
The moonlight brings conversation in the evening around to Goethe’s poem, which R. reads to me, but without enjoyment; we go on to the “Urworte” and suddenly R. remembers a long unexpressed desire of ours and calls for Aeschylus’s Agamemnon. He then reads it, and I feel as if I have never before seen him like this, transfigured, inspired, completely at one with what he is reading; no stage performance could have a more sublime effect than this recital, Cassandra’s first cries of warning quite heartrending! ... After the first two choruses, R. says, taking a pinch of snuff, “Lovely moon, you rise so silent,” in which even the finest of our lyric poetry is made to look so childish.
Over our afternoon coffee R. quotes from Gleizes the following thought by Xenophon: sheaves of grain give those who have planted them the courage to defend them; standing in the fields, they have the same significance as the victor’s prize in a tournament, and this once more brings home to us exactly what the ancient world means to us! Various passages from Schiller and Goethe about the German public, which they call the least aesthetics-minded of all: “Perhaps there is something in that,” says R.
Early in the morning R. played Der Schweizerbub again, Palumbello [the dog] howling along with it. Eva comes in, R. tries again, but Palumbello keeps silent: “He is shy,” says Eva!