Sunday, January 8:
After a good night R. and I have breakfast in the conservatory, and he says, “It has occurred to me that we now seem to concern ourselves only with dead things; everything around us is lifeless, whereas previously our existence was concerned with living things, with plants, animals; Wotan carved his spear from the growing ash tree.” When I say that it is perhaps this life within life that has given later generations a feeling for divinity, and that Siegfried and Brünnhilde give the appearance of sacred, living Nature, whereas the Gibichungs are already among the dead, he agrees with me. From this we go on to Keller’s story, and I say how regrettable it is that our modern world has led him to subjects such as commercial secretaries, people one is almost ashamed to mention, remembering how the people of the Middle Ages brought forth such figures as Geneviève and Elisabeth. He then wants to rest, is disturbed by the children’s reading, calls for me to help him, but there is no more question of work, and he decides to go to the museum with us. Memling’s charming and masterly picture pleases him as a very delightful piece of trifling, but what most enchants him is the Greek ram. Unfortunately the happy outing ends for him in vexation and feelings of indisposition; he was too lightly dressed, he begins to feel cold, and the Rosario chapel, which we also intended to visit, has such a disagreeable effect on him that I send the children in alone and drive home with him. January 8 awakens memories of Hans, the dinner in Munich in 1868; he talks about Bülow in his youth, how, along with Karl Ritter, he had scoffed loudly at Reissiger, walking along the street behind R. Toward evening R. feels he really has caught cold, he tries to work but then asks to be read to, and in the evening we play whist. R. is extremely vexed by music coming from the room above his.
[Added on the next page but referred back to this point: “At lunch he recalls the Norns’ scene and is pleased to have written such a thing; he declares, half in jest and half in earnest, that nobody has ever mentioned all the things there are in it.”]