Monday, November 28:
He had a restless night, and my little anniversary gift [enclosed in the Diaries, a heavily corrected verse by Cosima entitled “November 28”] finds him in a disgruntled mood, but it gives him pleasure, and he comes to breakfast with the cap on his head.
He tells me he is working on a difficult passage, and altogether he is longing passionately for the day when this score will be finished. At lunch I tell him about our morning walk with the children, hoping that his disgruntlement is caused by the sirocco. We drive to the Favorita but do not get out.
I tell him about the B. Blätter and Kant’s remarks, among them the one about life (quoted by Bruno Bauer), and I tell him I always feel like making an addition of my own to it when I think about us. R. repeats to me what he meant to say in the morning with his joke about “Monsieur Fate”: “What mattered to the universal spirit was our preservation, and so it was ordained that in life we should persevere; none of the other things involved has anything to do with life.”
At lunch he once again said how much he always regrets that we did not discover each other ten or fifteen years earlier. We spend the evening in chat; R. reads to us Porges’s article about my father, to our amusement as well as our concern, since its lack of clarity in expression makes its good intentions and occasional judiciousness even more terrible!
I then read aloud Bruno Bauer’s article on Luther, which gratifies us all. R. thinks Stein’s style somewhat overornate (letter to W.). A telegram from Niemann - “Tristan today, remember us” - arouses smiling astonishment. I am glad that it is happening today.