Tuesday, December 28:
Not a good night for R. But in the morning he takes a short rest. At one o'clock we go for a walk in the palace gardens with Loldchen and Evi, the weather too mild. In the afternoon R. and I go again, but in the rain, which now descends on us almost every day and gives more urgency to R.'s thoughts of Italy.
In the afternoon Seidl plays passages from Parsifal. R. comes to listen and is pleased, for he says it has all become so strange to him. In the evening we again go through parts of the second act and the Prelude.
R.'s reading material is now A Voyage to the Land of Elephants; he shows me the engravings, and while we are looking at them, I am reminded of the sect R. once told me about, which regards the spirit and not the flesh as being responsible for evil. I say that, seeing animals — the elephants in the rice fields — one gets the feeling that it is only human beings with their "spirit" who have brought cruelty and malice into the world. R. replies, "Yes, certainly, and in every sect there lies some truth, a genuine perception — but developed one-sidedly and thus leading to mistakes."
When we retire in the evening, he tells me about a scientific encyclopedia by Hederich owned by his father; he says he would like to have it for the sake of the article on opera. He recalls that in it opera was described as the worst form of art, and he says to me, "Strange to think that people like Semper and even Goethe looked on such isolated pieces — the cavatinas, the dances — designed for entertainment as the proper artistic form."
Yesterday he spoke of the private performance of Lohengrin and observed that it was not really the right way — for drama one needs people.