Sunday, July 17:
After a good night for R. we have breakfast in our bedroom, butter for the first time, but also cold! He comes back to the subject of Schott, the letter he intends to write, and says how hard it is to attain life’s flowering, contemplative thinking! As he leaves me, he feels his chest and heart, then says, “As long as that is still warm and beating, everything is all right,” and he tells me how he recently enjoyed watching his watch charms moving to and fro in time with his heartbeats.
It occurs to me then that his speech seems to bear a direct relationship to his heartbeat, whereas in other people the slow pulse is not strong enough to inspire the words, which are then supplied from outside, emerging either in a parrotlike fashion or as the result of laborious thought. All in him is compulsion. We also talk about Hans in the morning, and he agrees with me when I say that for such a person death does not seem like salvation. “It is a cry,” he says.
He writes his letter to Feustel about Schott and Dr. Strecker in the morning, then we eat alone, since the children are on an outing in the country with the Grosses. Yesterday, when he mentioned that he had no need of friends, he added, “On the contrary, the children stand between us - an intrusion I could not do without.” Lunch passes in a welter of chat about all sorts of things, including the present-day extravagance of Paris, which R. says would still look petty in comparison with that of ancient Rome. Over coffee I relate various things, among them the rabbi’s curious statement. He then reads to me his letter concerning his relationship with the firm of Schott, and it is really excellent. What he finds most disagreeable in his contacts with such people, he says, is their silence when he has explained to them how things stand.
He revises the letter in the afternoon. Then we settle down in the turret, where he drinks a glass of beer; after that we set out to view the public baths. We feel as if we are in the country, walking from our estate onto common land. The baths please us; we stroll in the finest weather across the railroad track, through the palace gardens, and home, to our own amazement, for R. these days hardly keeps the cobbler busy! Supper outside the house, conversation about Hans, R. severe - I beg him not to say that Hans must either die soon or go mad, for such statements frighten me.
Wolz. and Forges arrive. R. goes through Templer und Judin, the court scene, and relates what impression it made on him in his youth, when he saw it done by the very talented singer Hammerstein, this scene between Bois-Guilbert and Rebecca. He says he has often asked himself where it was that he gained the impressions which enabled him to set to work with such a will, and then he would recall the many good singers he has seen, both male and female. In the palace gardens during our walk home he told me about his stepfather, how he arranged a shooting party and sketched Frau Hartwig as she aimed at a bird; then how he, father Geyer, invited some boys to a party on R.’s birthday, and was very sad when they turned out to be rough, something prepared in such a friendly spirit proving a failure!
Around 10:30 we say tender goodbyes, both to each other and to this so harmonious day. We gaze at the moon from R.’s room, and I remember how he recently mentioned the stars he had seen in Naples, hanging like a net let down from the arch of Heaven; I gazed upon them with my naked eye and saw them large and magical, whereas through glasses they appeared small and insignificant, and I attached much importance to this discovery. When R. is in bed, he says, “This century has performed one good deed: it brought you into the world,” which makes me laugh, yet at the same time serves as a solemn warning and an invitation to prayer.
(I am writing this on Monday to the noise of a military parade - R., when he heard it recently in the palace gardens, said, “This crude speech - as if everything always has to be uttered in rage and fury!”) Over coffee, when I say, in connection with the letter to Dr. Str., “With the interest on the sum you have demanded we can travel to Palermo or wherever we wish,” R. laughs and says that is like the story of the boy and the foal. [Two lines, incomplete and in consequence untranslatable, omitted.] He says his mother often quoted this - she and his first wife introduced him to popular sayings. The puppies are already coming to the supper table to beg; R. is very amused that they already know what supper means! At lunch we also talked about Platen’s article, begun yesterday, then about Goethe and his dramatic skill in Faust - “when he does not get lost” - “true, when he does get lost, the detail is still interesting.”