Wednesday, April 6:
R. slept quite well and goes off gladly to work. Friend Gross, who has lunch with us, thinks that he is looking very well. When we embrace following the after-coffee grace, R. tells our friends that we are still on our honeymoon, for we still have at least 15 years to make up.
I pay various calls on our neighbors (diphtheria there now on top of everything else), also visit the Jagers, since the poor man is ill. When I tell R. all this, at first he chides me, and when I ask him not to be angry, he quotes Schopenhauer’s remark about a kind heart, “What is Francis Bacon in comparison?” He finds this splendid in Schopenhauer, and from there he goes on to talk of emigration and the future community, saying that it must be held together by a vow - for instance, only to eat food of one kind or another.
At supper he tells me that his mind is full of the music for Klärchen’s death, the change into A minor. He says he could write a whole book about it - about music as an emanation of religion - and he comes back to it in the evening: “What this C natural means in A minor!” We have a cozy game of whist, Boni, he, and I.
In the margin he adds: “During whist he sings Tristan, which I have been singing all day, and he says that at the time he wrote it his life had been me tempête dans un verre d’eau [‘a storm in a teacup’], then he thinks with a shudder of the present-day public - in Tristan, for instance, nothing but hooked noses, and on top of that, those accents!” Afterward the two of us chat together downstairs and then once again upstairs (in the green room!), this time about the Gobineau article I am translating, about the industrious and securely instinctive Chinese. We were out of doors, much sweet twittering of birds, but a north wind.