Tuesday, December 6:
A mosquito disturbs our sleep. However, R. goes to his work early, even before our family breakfast. He would have liked me to surprise him, but I, unaware of that, call him. At Irmch I tell him about my reading with the children (Sism., the Sicilian Vespers period), and he enlarges upon the power the church possessed, all the monasteries, buildings, canonizations - it all came from the church. The continual acts of destruction, the conspiracies show him that the universal spirit has little concern for the beauty of paintings or buildings.
At lunch he repeats his strictures on beards, those emblems of the animal in men which he cannot bear. After lunch we are both led to the first movement of the C minor Symphony; R. plays part of it and says, “Nothing like this outburst of enthusiasm and joy existed before Beethoven; Mozart knew nothing at all about it, though Weber has an inkling of it; this is one of those passages which, if one could decipher them, would explain the world to us.” He promises to perform symphonies between the performances.
“Oh,” he suddenly exclaims over coffee, “why do I need to have the bassoon blowing low notes?” I ask, “Where?” He replies, “In the baptism. Anyway, I can’t bear the bassoon.” Then he says he ruled his score lines wrongly in Siena: “It’s terrible when one has been given pedantry and inspiration inside the same skin - a real torment.” I observe that this is what produces genius. “Oh, this world of ours,” he exclaims, “it is terrible!” And a little later, thinking of a time and place in which he would like to have lived, he says it would be with Plutarch in Chaeroneia: he had been very close to the greatest and had experienced so much, then came under the wing of the Antonines, but always in Chaeroneia. “With Shakespeare in Stratford, no, one could not have borne that - he had to live among people who had no idea of what he was.”
We go for a walk. The cathedral exterior enchants him, reminds him of Indian buildings, and he observes that it looks like a king’s castle. He says he enjoys living in a town with a building like that, but the rainy weather conjures up within him a picture of a journey up the Nile. Today, when R. mentioned the girls’ situation, it stabbed my heart, so much melancholy does it cause me to think of the children in our state of isolation and estrangement. Then I call these gloomy thoughts which weigh me down, and I do believe, my children, that by quietly accepting things as they come I shall bring down upon your heads more blessings than if I were to attempt, at the cost of peace, to win for you some other lot. Let the blessings which are certainly yours persist undisturbed by my worries, and everything be entrusted to God - and, dear Lord, give me, preserve in me the strength of serenity!
At lunch R. related things from Kant’s book on the human races, which pleases him on account of the naivete of its descriptions. In the evening I start reading to our little circle Bismarck’s speeches, but R. interrupts me. We conclude the evening with a discussion of the B. Blätter; R. feels that it should be allowed to die, though he is concerned about Wolz.’s fate. He was somewhat irritable, and I frequently call upon the God within me to give me strength against evil spirits. When we are alone together, then everything is always all right! But that is not always possible. Today he wrote in his BramesBuch that the reason he cannot get along with other people is the foolish questions he is asked, which drive him to despair (“What do you think of Gounod?”, etc.).
This morning he compared the drenched palm trees with a Spaniard returning from a masquerade.