Wednesday, January 19:
R. did not have an entirely good night, and he does not feel well. He begs my pardon for complaining, and I say that it is the great drawback of love that it cannot overcome all the trials of life. “No, but it makes us forget them,” R. replies, and, truly, in the course of our conversation together they are soon forgotten. But then, as always, comes day!
Many thoughts of Andalusia in the past few days, and it is constantly being declared that we shall spend next winter in Seville. R. speaks glowingly of the good Italy did him, particularly Siena.
I tell R. about old Frau von Aufsess’s 14-year-old dog, which the police have taken away from her on account of the present precautionary measures. R. says: “It’s like everything else, they do not bother their heads about food being adulterated, animals being tortured, but someone suddenly hatches the abstract idea that at a certain age animals turn into corpses. I don’t know what I should do if somebody came into my house and took away a dog.”
Today R. goes for a walk in the palace gardens by himself, since I am not quite well. Friend Levi arrives toward evening, and music is played, that is to say, R. sings some ballades by Loewe, in order to show, as he puts it, “what has been lost in us Germans.” We always take great delight in these productions, in which, as R. says, the poetry makes more impact than the music.
Then he announces to Herr Levi, to his astonishment, that he is to conduct Parsifal: “Beforehand, we shall go through a ceremonial act with you. I hope I shall succeed in finding a formula which will make you feel completely one of us.” The veiled expression on our friend’s face induces R. to change the subject, but when we are alone, we discuss this question further. I tell R. that what seems to me to be the difficulty here is that the community into which the Israelite would be accepted has itself abandoned Christ, though it might write about him, whereas previously blood was shed and everything sacrificed in his behalf. R. says he himself has certainly remained true to him, and in his last essay he more or less outlined what the formula would be. “The trouble is,” he exclaims, “that all great personalities reveal themselves to us in time and space, and are thus subject to change.”
When we have our first parting, he exclaims jokingly, “What an accursed subject you have brought up here!” and when we come together again, he raises it once more, and we agree that this alien race can never be wholly absorbed into our own. R. tells me, and I write it down here, for he has repeatedly said it to me, with very great earnestness and not a trace of mockery, that when our friend modestly approached him and kissed his hand, R. embraced him with great inner warmth, and from what emanated between them, he came to feel with extraordinary precision what a difference of race and separateness really mean. And thus the good Jew always suffers a melancholy lot in our midst.