Friday, July 23:
R. slept well, and in our gladness we continue with the dictation; when we come upon the word “pessimism,” R. says, “If the optimists only knew what a bad time they would have had under their improved conditions!”
After the dictation he reads to me a page from a letter by Schiller about Christianity, very, very beautiful and profound. “Certainly,” R. says in response to my remarks, “he was the profound one, Goethe was the wizard.” We agree that he should use a part of this passage as a motto for his article; he cannot use the whole of it, for they had not yet become aware of the real and terrible problem.
We go to the beach, and it has a pleasant effect on R. No Rheingold in the evening, owing to a broken piano hammer; conversation about all sorts of things on the terrace by moonlight, reminiscences of Bohemia, the romantic land of his youth, of Riga, which he knew when it was a completely German town, but to which was suddenly sent, as head of police, a Russian cavalry captain who could speak neither German nor French, “a fine state of affairs.”
Thirst brings us to the subject of Christ on the cross, and he relates his death, as differently envisaged by Renan and Gfrörer.