Tuesday, October 26:
R. is somewhat restless today, and also it is cold. He goes to the Belle Arti and finds pleasure in the older pictures, which seem to him more accomplished. We take a communal walk to the Giardino Popolare, then he leaves us, near Lavena, to have a glass of beer at Dreher's; he returns to us in a very agitated state, having been kept waiting too long for 2 lire.
I pay a farewell visit to Frau v. W[ohrmann]; on my return I find him looking sad, he says he had been bored without me.
In the evening R. plays Beeth. sonatas to us; in the first movement of the F minor R. says it is a dialogue between decent kindness and noisy mischief. He comes to the subject of Saint Mark's Cathedral and says it is a stroke of magic; every time he sets eyes on it, he feels it might just as easily vanish overnight. He talked about Brahmanism and Buddhism, saying that the former petered out in a sort of conceited intellectuality, like all philosophy apart from Schopenhauer, whereas Buddhism placed all its emphasis on morality.