Saturday, January 8:
R. had a tolerable night. In the morning we talk once more about Lusch’s letter. “Yes,” he says, “if she imagines she will ever again find someone like you!” And he observes that in the social world there is in fact a great deal of vulgarity to be found, even among the women, while the men can talk only about horses. “A man like Schleinitz is extraordinarily rare, heartless though he may be.”
R. is not entirely pleased by our friends’ coming here for a conference; he says he feels no great eagerness to stage the work, though it gave him much joy to write it.
At 12 R. calls me and shows me how he has placed his nice slippers beneath his big chair; things like that give him pleasure, he says, when he enters the room. When I tell him I can understand that, he says, “Yes, but your way of making your room pleasant is just to put up nasty pictures of me.”
Then he tells me that he feels like writing his article about the present Jewish problem; I had suggested it to him, and he would like to do it now, to ask, “What does a Jew find when he comes to us?”
R. works after we have been for a stroll in the palace gardens.
In the evening Herr Schön, Pohl, and Heckel; R. annoyed, first because, not wishing to retain his informal clothes, he feels uncomfortable, and second because he has no desire to talk about these things. He finds the good people all too unsatisfactory and insignificant, and the first moment of meeting is tart on his side and rather off-putting. But he soon recovers, makes jokes with and about Pohl, and when Rub. plays my father’s arrangement of the Hummel septet, R. is in high spirits and finds much amusement in this old-fashioned, worthy piece, with all its padding. Afterward he plays with Rub. the Overture to Rienzi.
When our friends have left, R. and I remain alone together; it is as if we discover each other anew, and how beautiful, how splendid the discovery then turns out to be! R. wanted to drink Hans’s health; I asked him not to.