Sunday, July 4:
R. slept well, only he wishes he could take his morning walk in J.'s Pieta, since it is shadowy there. Dictation at 11 o'clock, after which he says, "It must seem rather odd to you, taking down things which are so familiar from our conversations."
The Schrons and Rubinstein to lunch; the latter refuses to eat fish, so as not to return to earth as a fish, and R. criticizes so personal and literal an interpretation of symbols. Everything, he says - birth and rebirth, life and death - is always present, and it is for the common people that one is obliged to set such symbols in the context of time; and he repeats what he recently said to us in Sorrento, when someone spoke of a person who would not travel on a Sunday so as not to make work for the people on the railroad: "Do not imagine that the individual can ever dissociate himself from the state of sinfulness."
Talk at lunch about the Germans, their addiction to beer, their beer halls and tobacco-smoke arguments: "In beer halls, that's where they discover their wit." Also about our accursed climate, which he says makes us so materialistic, so immoderate. After lunch R. talks of the human being's finest achievement: the dog; this act occurred before recorded history, he says, but now they are being chained up, virtually turned back into wild animals. Speaking of the Queen of Italy, R. says, "This is how I like a queen to look nowadays, sad and amiable; the gay ones or maliciously peevish ones are repulsive."
The evening spent with our friends; R. says to Herr v. Stein that he is sorry to hear he is soon to leave us, and when I say that I hope the period of separation will pass as quickly as the time we have spent together, R. says, "There is no such thing as hope - only acceptance; all the good things in life are like a pleasant dream in a troubled sleep." To end the evening he reads to us a passage in Goethe which particularly pleases him, his remarks about astrology and the way it is used in Wallenstein.
I still want to mention a little domestic incident, since it reveals an aspect of R.'s character: when I spoke of the invitation to the Schrons, friend Jouk. said to Herr v. Stein that in this case they had better go out to eat; I took them at their word and invited the Schron boys instead; our friends would, however, have liked to remain with us, and in the evening they tell us of their difficulties. R. said, "I should just have come to the table, as if to say, 'Send me away if you dare!'" {Added in margin: "Of Prof. Schron's strange fleeting glances R. says, 'That comes from dissecting corpses.'"}