Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of February 24, 1881

Overview

Richard suffers through a painful night with his fingers and cannot write, yet manages a brief flash of good humor before the discomfort reasserts itself. Dr. Landgraf's visit brings relief and lively conversation — including an anecdote about a student who received poor marks even on an essay his father had ghostwritten — and the evening with friend Wolzogen touches on the principled limits of their journal's advocacy, rejecting both vegetarianism and anti-Jewish agitation as too narrowly polemical. Richard closes the night with a luminous meditation on moral equality and a quietly profound reflection that one might greet both the end of a day and death itself with Faust's words: "Stay a while, you are so fair."

Content

Thursday, February 24:

R. had a bad night, his fingers are tormenting him, and today he cannot even write. He does have a moment of gaiety before lunch, but it soon passes; everything pains and upsets him. Dr. Landgraf, who joins us for coffee, thinks that the rubber fingers have overheated him; he takes them off.

He finds the conversation with Dr. Landgraf entertaining; the latter talks about the school, that the children who have received bad marks just think they were born to be graded 3 and 4. And he relates that once, when he wrote a German essay for his son, the boy was given the same bad marks. Today Siegfried has his first Latin lesson.

We go for a walk with R. as far as the Birk, delight in the pretty little place, but at the same time remember Siena! At supper R. talks of his father Geyer, his kindness, his consideration, and his at that time predominating interest in the theater. Yesterday R. recalled an anecdote, told him by his mother, about a woman who sat in a stall outside the theater selling meat pies, and how in the intermissions the students, knowing that she had no more pies to sell but wanting to annoy her, would demand these from her, ignoring her nuts and other merchandise, and that brought curses from her.

In the evening friend Wolz. visits us; R. tells him that we cannot champion special causes such as vegetarianism in our Blätter, but must always confine ourselves to defining and demonstrating the ideal, leaving those outside to fight for their special cause; for the same reason we cannot join in the anti-Jewish agitation. All sorts of things are discussed, and my reply to Herr v. Hülsen also receives an amicable mention.

When our friends have gone, R. and I remain cozily together. R. drafts a telegram to Herr Neumann about abandoning Berlin. “Intellectual equality cannot be achieved,” R. says, as if replying to Count Gobineau, “but moral equality, attaining that, this one could urge.” In the evening, before going off to sleep, he says, “Stay a while, you are so fair” - this one can say of the moment when the day is cast aside, and, in a larger sense, of death.