Tuesday, March 8:
R. continues work on his “Hollendämmerung” (as the newspapers call it); I with the children. Toward noon a letter arrives from Herr Wesendonck, which makes an unpleasant impression on R. as well as on me. Around Christmas R. had asked him for copies of papers in the family’s possession, and instead they sent back the originals. Embarrassed by this, R. wanted to give something in return, and sent the printed proofs of the biography with a long letter explaining its significance. To this Herr W. now replies so clumsily, advising him not to proceed with it in such minute detail, etc., that R. is greatly vexed.
In the afternoon I am overcome by melancholy, the old canon keeps over and over returning to my mind: happiness lies in renunciation alone. Children, it does not look as if I have renounced anything; God knows how my life will be judged, but I beg you to take to heart the knowledge I have gained through sorrow and joy: there is no happiness on earth except sacrifice. To wish nothing for oneself, to seek nothing, to give oneself up to serving the smallest, the most unimportant, to doing good—that, my children, is the way to freedom, believe me! In the evening we tell Porges some of the things which led me to the break—and R. says, “People are so deceitful, so sham, that not one of them was prepared to believe in your sincerity and your truthfulness.” In the evening read from the second part of Faust with intense delight. Then from Osterwald’s Hermes Odysseus. Late in the evening R. speaks in more detail about the unpleasant experience with O[tto] W[esendonck], in whom he had confided only out of goodness of heart and who replied to him so insolently.