Monday, February 21:
An article in the A.A.Z. about conditions in London produces from R. the following words at breakfast: “The world is so terrible, and self-deception through the individuation of the will so great, that everyone takes himself to be the whole. None can escape the guilt of existence, yet none can radically get the better of the world. So everyone has to try to maintain his battered position and atone for the guilt he has earned in bringing sorrow to others with great goodness of heart and deeds of the spirit, which bring benefit to so many.” And then, also about London: “Such a city is the cancer of a nation, it sucks it dry; if Bismarck really wants to abolish great cities, he has had a truly German thought.” “Misery of the kind we see before our eyes is something the Greeks never knew.” Yesterday we felt pleased that in his portrait Tischbein had draped Schiller in purple. “Of all poets,” I said, “he is the only one I like to imagine in purple.” R.: “Because he no longer led a personal life, he knew he would die young, he wanted to complete his task, and for that reason there is something noble, heroic about him.” “The Spaniards were right,” he said jokingly. “I see Cervantes as a cripple, an old soldier in a brown coat, contemplating the world from his guardroom.” — In the evening astronomy lesson with the children, and afterward back to Nohl’s Gluck und Wagner. R. was rather tired out by his work today and remarked that the life we were leading was perhaps exhausting for the very reason that it always called for the highest, both in feelings and in creativeness.