Sunday, December 12:
A wretched night followed these lovely stimulations, and I feel as if my poor head is going on strike. In the morning R. observes that we are now in the mood of the first movement. He goes to his work but complains that he requires instruments he does not have, and he would need to invent some, not in order to make more noise, but to express what he has in mind. Later he tells me he has decided on trombones and trumpets, it concerns the exit to the lake: strange as it might seem, it should prove as successful as previously the trumpets and flutes in the Faust Overture.
At lunch our friend Stein’s views on the right to sacrifice lives for the revolution is a triviality run mad; and he says if the idea is such that it must be sealed by human blood, one must in that case sacrifice oneself. Over coffee memories of the festival performances come into his mind, particularly the first scene of Rheingold, and he feels that its achievements were not properly appreciated.
We attempt to go out of doors, but the weather makes it impossible. I go to his study to greet him, and tell him that he was wrong to say that the day would not fulfill any wish, for me at least all wishes are fulfilled when he is content. Whereupon he: “It was also wrongly formulated; we have no wish — it is only that what comes to us from outside gives us no pleasure, we just have to bear it.” In the evening with Stein the question of how to educate a boy; R. would like to see the gradual emergence of embryonic states and their development explained to a child in a religious sense, in the way the Brahmans taught the creation of the world to their people. We then continue reading Cervantes’s story with unalloyed pleasure.