Saturday, January 20:
Our breakfast brings up the subject of the children's life — whether one can and should cut them right off from the community, whether we are not asking too much of them in our isolation. Eva, for example, is curiously irritable, and the doctor has forbidden reading material such as Don Carlos. A difficulty which I leave to my good star!
We go out; R. feels run down, he goes into Lavena's, while I enter Saint Mark's and feel as if I am swimming in gold. On our way home he tells me his dream: he was climbing a high mountain with me and thought that he was leading me, until he noticed that I was supporting him, and as the path got anguishingly narrower and narrower, he realized that I was exerting myself unreasonably to support him; then he woke up.
R. is in a very gentle mood, and he tells us at lunch that we must not take his vexed remarks, such as he made last night, so seriously. He tells us some very droll things from the Bayreuther Blätter (such as a Tirolean Jewish masked ball, violets optional) and declares that he prefers these illustrators to all our modern painters.
In the afternoon he goes on foot to the Cannaregio (I to the antique shop). When I arrive home, I go to see him; he shows me what he has written down as the result of his walk: "Too much talking and listening gets in the way of seeing." "Profitable seeing: all the things one's gaze takes in when one is glancing across a bridge."
In the evening we talk about Schiller's Don Carlos: the Queen's words "Never more shall I respect a man," which I have always taken to mean "since you are to die," R. interprets as love's bitter reproach to Posa for sacrificing himself. We talk of the great and deep delicacy of these turns of phrase, and when I remark how touching it is to imagine these delicate images of the soul sharing Schiller's miserable existence in Loschwitz, R. replies in a gruff but friendly tone: "Where should they come from, then? The Spanish Court, maybe?" He does not read to us this evening.