Tuesday, February 1:
R. had a restless night and is feeling very strained; in the morning we have another discussion about Hamlet and also talk again about the Jews. I say, in connection with Rub., that it is precisely because of them that one would feel bound to become a Christian, which makes R. laugh.
Around noon R. comes to me and shows me a passage in Prof. Diihring’s essay to the effect that “a German can be meaner than any Jew,” and it is true that the two pages about R. are deplorable. On the other hand, R. reads to us over coffee two statements by a Moslem in Count Gobineau’s story La Vie de voyage, one about life, the other about Europe, both remarkably pregnant.
When we go for a walk in the palace gardens, we talk about the superiority of the Moslems, to whom the idea of submission to an unfathomable god is so familiar, a feeling unknown to the Jews. R. works.
In the evening friend Feustel comes, whom R. instructs to reimburse the 40,000 marks to Hans, telling him that he can discover the reasons for this reimbursement in letters to Prof. Frege. Friend Feustel is very understanding. A. Rothschild’s letter to Pastor Stoecker is discussed; it is taken to be a hoax, even though one feels certain that Israelites do speak in this way.
At the conclusion of the evening, memories of Tribschen, of Richter with the children; in the morning I had glanced through my first diary. Of our journey across the Brünig (1866) R. says, “That was our best time.” I say Tribschen was our good time. R. promises to complete his biography after Parsifal.
When we return from our walk, I tell R. that I call an expression in his face, a complete change of both manner and look, a Schwendi Fluh, and I feel very flattered at being permitted to live on this rugged and forbidding crag. He says yes, now and again he suddenly becomes aware of the nonsense he is talking, and then withdraws into himself. He sees a blackbird in the palace gardens; yesterday we heard what sounded like siskins, and they seemed to be following us from tree to tree: “Gentlemen, you are too early.” When friend Jouk. says that Levi is always stripped of so many illusions when he is here, R. says with a laugh, “Yes, they are removed from him by the cartload, like piles of snow.”