Thursday, December 8:
Immaculata! The children accompany their governess to this curious feast and tell us the oddest things about it. In history (the Battle of Meloria and its consequences), he says what happened there is just as in Nature, the same naive cruelty, and so it was everywhere up to the moment which he calls Jesur; for a sensitive person, he says, the impulses of Nature are horrible!
We go for a walk on the terrace overlooking the sea and enjoy the view in spite of the cloudy skies. R. then works diligently and with much exertion till 7:30, and even then supper comes too early for him! In the evening he reads “The Diver” to us; it moves us greatly, though R. misses in the description the sufferings the boy must have undergone when holding his breath under water. R. says he would not have forgotten such a thing, since his approach is always a practical one. When I recall that the episode is said to have occurred under Friedrich II, R. starts talking passionately about princes and great men and their cruelty.
He comes to the present-day ones and says, “This ability to see 1,000 men go to their death before one’s eyes, and yet to stay in some sort of good humor, to go to the ballet afterward, all in the name of epaulets, military duty, retreat, à la suite! Above all, uniforms - they are the reason everyone thinks alike.” He gets very heated, and I have the feeling that the presence of some alien elements is partly to blame for that, though he continues to express his opinions. Today we called Mozart the musician of the Renaissance. And as he was watching the raging of the sea, he said, “And to build a dam against that helps Faust to get over all his sufferings about Gretchen - what frivolity!”