Tuesday, September 14:
R. slept well, and he works before breakfast; during this he tells me that he was just about to send me a message saying that the Pope was summoning me to Avignon. Earlier he had played the spinning song from La Dame blanche, and also the ballad, and he says that such things are peculiar to the French, something in which no other nation can compare with them, also such figures as Gleizes.
Then he brings up Shakespeare and says people ought to perform one of his plays and then, having thus been brought into very close contact with the horrors of life, go to Holy Communion. And especially the historical plays, they ought to be seen every year. One might almost say that a play like Egmont owes its origin to a mood, a philosophical mood with which one can wholeheartedly agree; but in Shakespeare there is neither mood nor purpose, a veil is torn aside, and we see things as they are. Particularly in the histories. In Hamlet we find a situation similar to our own: we recognize the wretched limitations of our animal existence and, not having the power to change it, leave it as it is and take refuge in irony.
I then told him that this was why I did not like to talk about perceived truths which I was not permitted to obey. “One only does so in order to impart one’s perception to others.” And, in between all this, constant jokes from the Fl. Blätter.
I feel rather unwell at lunch and finally have to be borne off in a faint. Perhaps the thundery atmosphere. I recover so quickly that I am able to go for a drive with R., which gives him much delight, since he is growing more and more attached to this locality.
In the evening conversations about the Russo-Turkish War and the Franco-Russian War; R. remarkably well informed on both. He tells of a mass emigration of Englishmen from two provinces to America.