Saturday, January 14:
R. is rather tired; he reads Renan’s Marc Aurèle (feeling that this emperor is overrated), and writes to Fritz Brandt, entrusting the supervision of the machinery to him. He then goes for a walk with the girls, and at 1 o’clock we have our meal in celebration of Parsifal, though R. insists that the work was finished on an anecdote from Renan’s book in which someone boasts that as an academician he could speak with Plato, and as a stoic with Zeno, but Pythagoras would remain silent with him; whereupon somebody at the meeting called out, “Then imagine that Pyth. is now with you, and keep silent.”
There is talk of portraits, and he says merrily that somebody should depict him with me offering him the apple of vegetarianism. I tell him that, since I heard him get so angry with Nietzsche over this subject, I have no longer had the courage to turn vegetarian. R. relates: “Yes, when he came to our house, ate nothing, said, ‘I am a vegetarian,’ I said to him, ‘You are an ass!’”
Recently, though I do not remember in what connection, we agreed that it is only people with a limited outlook who, by not knowing or by ignoring many things, can set up a system. We go for a short walk, R. pays two calls, and as we are returning, we hear some long, sustained, solemn tones; the sounds come closer, arousing feelings of earnestness and exaltation in us; we listen; a funeral procession passes by, the music simple but not vulgar, extremely beautiful, expressively played; R. is completely entranced: “Oh, what a divine thing music is - how it transforms everything!” he exclaims. Unfortunately he is annoyed by the garments and faces of the prelates. We tell our friends about it.
In the evening, after Rub. has played part of my father’s arrangement of the Tannhäuser Overture, he says he was influenced by a passage in the first part of Berlioz’s Harold Symphony; in youth one borrows from others, he says; he likes this symphony, the first movement in particular, also the serenade and the pilgrims’ march. When I remark that it seems to me soulless, he says, “Yes, a landscape painter like Mendelssohn.” I: “I think even more soulless than Mendelssohn.” - “Yes, it is like the clattering of bones, a skeleton, but there is a skeleton.”
And I cannot remember by what transition we come to stories about saints, and he recounts the tale of the Rhineland saint who sucked out a pestilence sore, and it seemed to her the sweetest thing she had ever tasted. He says that for him this contains everything, and he would come back to it again. “We artists,” he says, turning to Jouk., “are sugar in comparison.” He also tells the story about Saint Francis rolling among the pigs on the Pope’s command. We finish the evening with a game of whist.