Friday, December 16:
A good night for R., but at breakfast he is rather resentful, because I am coughing and cannot take the matter seriously. He works, goes into the garden around lunchtime, takes delight in the camellias, and at table chats with the children. Then he goes out with them and takes them to the Casa Rossa, which I liked so much; but on his return he complains that he had another chest spasm, had to sit down, is feeling very run down! All the same, he works.
In the evening we go through the newspapers. An article by an actor, containing many impossible and boastful things, arouses R.’s anger, and also his amazement that such stuff can be accepted and put into print. After all these various reports, and after an article on Ireland has provided an opportunity to discuss the insolubility of this problem - for the people there have now become like animals looking only for a chance to bite - and the awkwardness of Gladstone’s situation, with nobody showing any understanding of it, R. talks about his lack of sympathy in connection with the catastrophe in Vienna. “It sounds hard and is almost unnatural, but people are too wicked for one to be much affected when they perish in masses. As I have already said, when people are buried in coal mines, I feel indignation at a community which obtains its heating by such means; but when such-and-such a number of members of this community die while watching an Offenbach operetta, an activity which contains no trace of moral superiority, that leaves me quite indifferent.” I mention the war: “There people were at least inspired by great acts of sacrifice and a sense of living for an idea.”
Earlier, in connection with the Irish problem, he exclaimed, “We shall all become slaves like them, for property has been canonized, and now the gentlemen from the stock exchange are in charge.” A moment of amusement is occasioned by a postcard from Cyriax, from whom I had ordered a new kind of umbrella which had been recommended by the I. Z. and which R. thought good; Cyriax tells us it was a joke in a humorous journal, which the Ill. Z. took seriously! Frist, md Is. has now come to Königsberg, too.
When, in connection with the Vienna catastrophe, the lack of conscientiousness among the inspectors, etc., is mentioned, and someone says there would certainly have been more in Prussia, R. says: “Where is it to come from in Austria? A Slovak here, a Bohemian there, no one committed to community life, and as police chief a Baron Marx.” He again talks about the island of Ceylon and Orientals in general, who have gone furthest in recognizing the necessity of evil, who have accepted absolutism as the best form of government and bear with a series of bad rulers for the immeasurable happiness of occasionally getting a good one.
When I first awoke this morning I heard him say, “Night is still glowing.” Then he turned over and went back to sleep.