Monday, March 13:
We talk of Hans’s character, and R. admits to me that from the beginning there was always something alien about it for him, amounting almost to repulsion.
[The last four words are obliterated in ink by an unknown hand; the word “almost” is still uncertain.] He remarks how Lusch, for all her great resemblance to her father, nevertheless presents a completely transfigured image of his character. After he has broken out in humorous complaint about the need to get dressed, we continue our serious discussions over breakfast.
About the Italians, for instance: I told him that in the village of Piana dei Greci it struck me how well the craftsmen played their instruments, with fire and rhythm, although the music was dreadfully bad; they therefore still possess the aptitude, but their taste is horribly coarse. Then we recalled a certain moment from last night: R. played, shortly before the children began to sing, the “Porrazzi Melody,” which he had molded in the way he wished it to be. All of us stood around him, and when Count T. and Prince Gangi spoke of his fame and said they would give up all their lands to possess it, R. replied, “What is fame?” and quoted Schopenhauer’s likening it to an oyster shell after the oyster has been consumed.
I tell him today that I dearly like this idea but do not care for the image; R. agrees with me, saying it sounds as if it came from an 18th-century rake. Then we speak of North and South, their productive abilities; in the end R. says, “The longing to escape what is bad is the only really productive factor.” We are much amused by a droll remark from Siegfried; when Lusch tells us about the canonization and that the Pope fasted through it, Fidi asks, “Does the Archbishop fast as well?” R. completes his letter to Wolzogen.
Over supper he tells the children much about his family, his brother Julius, after talking to me a lot during the day about Ottilie—whether to invite her to the festival performances; he fears unhappiness may not have softened her.... In the evening I read aloud the Turgenev novel. A few evenings ago R. read to us some things from Kant’s book on physics, and we were astonished by the great naïveté of the descriptions—of the lion, for example. At the conclusion of the evening R. is still very vexed to think of Jouk.’s having shown his sketches to the King in Munich, since R. feels they are by no means sufficiently advanced for that. He is always complaining of being surrounded by “bunglers,” and he takes this relatively trivial matter terribly to heart.