Friday, July 16:
A restless night for R.; we stroll on the terrace, he shows me a splendid star, Jupiter, and we enjoy the mild air and also the great noise, for the people are again setting off fireworks. He then reads the Goethe-Schiller correspondence and quotes various things from it to me, which causes him to remark that he, too, has many ideas which he has neither used nor fully worked out, and a whole book could be made of them all. Today he spoke of the Greeks and their tragic drama (I forget whether I have already noted that he recently said the Greeks were the only ones who treated the world’s miseries in positive terms, whereas writers such as Cervantes and Goethe had also made use of irony).
As he leaves me after breakfast, he says, “We have lived for each other, and that has brought benefits for other people as well.” He works and is satisfied with what he has done. Over coffee he reads aloud Schiller’s opinion of Die Hermannsschlacht and says he is right about its heartlessness; indeed he feels that he has even depicted this heartlessness in Wetter vom Strahl and brought it into conflict with the soul.
He is still not taking sea baths and is trying to overcome his chest congestions and his heat rash through rest. On the terrace in the evening I relate various things I have just been reading, for example, the behavior of the popes toward the Hohenstaufens. R. says: “Yes, but what was to blame for it, what made such things possible, if not the dreadful circumstances of the time? The excommunication of Friedrich II, the people allowed that to happen. This is something historians never pay sufficient attention to: how peoples, nations, meet their end, all of it quite frightful. They concentrate on the great individual personalities and do not see the whole, how it grows progressively worse.”
I listen to but do not really hear what R. is saying, for something I find deeply painful has preceded it. The children draw his attention to a chirping sound nearby, and he cannot hear it. And only recently I was thinking with apprehensive pleasure of the bird he had not heard in Tribschen and believing that this anxiety was now past. Now once more I have to hear something he cannot hear, oh, life, oh, death, must the cup be drained? Ah, who has the strength? And who can honestly say: Thy will be done? When nothing else matters, there yet remains the capacity to suffer and grow weak with worry for the one who means everything, and to feel the sufferings of the whole universe in the emotion that is bliss. Oh life!
Saturday, July 17:
In bed R. hears 11 o’clock strike, and he knows what that means, he says, that he will have a bad night. But a little later he goes off to sleep in spite of the heat rash, which is tormenting him greatly. And in the morning he talks gaily about his pleasure in colors, saying that life in fact begins with pink. Yellow, blue, etc., all the rest are props, cheerfulness or whatever, but pink is life itself.
He works and reads the Goethe-Schiller correspondence but unfortunately is still unable to take a sea bath; he consults the doctor but learns little. All the same, he enjoys the terrace in the evening (“No one in Naples should come to life until night, and the night watchman should be seen only during the day!”).