Wednesday, February 16:
R. recalls his childhood days: how, returning from a visit to his godfather Trager, who had presented him with a worn-out gray dress suit and a Turkish waistcoat at which R.'s mother laughed, he had been welcomed very affectionately by his family in Dresden. He goes to his work, but his fingers are irritating him. He fetches me for lunch, and I show him the letter I have begun to Lusch, which, without my having intended it, is devoted entirely to Hans Sachs, and that in French. At lunch there is conversation about Gobineau, who prefers Brahmanism to Buddhism. I observe that, if one looks at the reality of things, he is probably not wrong, for Buddhism dissolves everything. R. goes for a walk with Jouk., returns home disgusted with the military music he has just been hearing: "And to these sounds my son is expected to march!" This arouses in him thoughts of emigration. Meanwhile he was amused by Marke, who, because of his stiff leg, fell down like a human being and then, when R. and Jouk. laughed, would not jump over the ditch before them, but waited until they turned their backs.
The lawyer Hofmann reports the loss of our lawsuit regarding the autograph in Wurzburg; R. sees in that a typical example of German justice and wants Wolz. to write about it. We read Cervantes in the evening, La ilustre fregona, with tremendous enjoyment. "Oh, the south!" R. exclaims, and frequently, "Shakespeare." He hopes to see these places, which are not yet as well trodden as Italy, and where people play guitars and sing for their own pleasure, not for the benefit of foreigners, as in Naples. And in the evening, when we are once more by ourselves, he says that we came together 15 years too late: "We would have founded a town of Wahnfried in America." He recalls previous relationships which he kept going and idealized because he did not wish to admit to himself how pitiful they were; I tell him that this is his tendency in all relationships: he must present the person with whom he has to do in an ideal light to himself, and in that way he makes him for a while look better than he is; if that is not possible, he, R., will have nothing to do with the person.
End of the sixteenth book of the Diaries. The seventeenth book begins: "To my Siegfried - begun on Eva's birthday. May family love be preserved among you, my children!"