Monday, March 28:
R. had a good night. The most perfect spring weather tempts him out into the garden before lunch, and after lunch we walk as far as the Students’ Wood, accompanied by the whirring of larks.
R.’s delight in them, and sad thoughts about human beings, who can think of nothing better to do with birds such as these than to “stuff them in their mouths.”
It would be a good thing for human beings of perception to reflect on these expressions of Will.
As we are walking home, R. catches sight of smoke rising, as straight as the lark itself, from a factory: “The one singing, the other stinking.”
He works on his score. The evening brings friend Wolz. R. says he would like to set the B. Bl. free, like a baby severed from the umbilical cord.
Then: “Gobineau says the Germans were the last card Nature had to play - Parsifal is my last card.”
When we are alone, he enlarges upon music: “Oh, what a triad like that means to me! Everything else vanishes before it. When it comes in again, after all the raving and raging and straying, it is like Brahma returning to himself.” “You can keep all your pictorial arts.”
He then comes back to the glories of music and says that when he thinks of the sounds of Palestrina and Bach - for this is what he means by glories - he is also reminded of Herwegh’s poem to me, and to this he appends fair and cherished sayings!
“How cold were I to call myself just happy!” R. cries out to me as we part after our walk.