Monday, April 25:
R. had a sad dream about our separation. Our mood is melancholy; I have regained my self-control and am glad. Boni in bed on account of slight hoarseness. The cuckoo calls, the hedgehog has gone, the cat laboriously carries its kittens to the bed in the guest room. Go out after lunch with R., he tells me that in his youth he always dreaded spring, for it meant the theaters would be empty, the audience absent, the poor musical director shown the door. As he is telling me this, a man appears and hands me a court summons. If I do not return to Berlin within 4 weeks, proceedings for divorce will be inaugurated. Only inaugurated! — In the morning R. sent off a different letter to Councilor Düfflipp, though I begged him to send the first. But the later one seems to me more suited to both the situation and the man. Letter from Schmidt, the musical director in Leipzig; fee for Die Meistersinger. Dancing lesson; Lusch experienced her first rebuff; she took it well. — Before beginning our reading R. says: “I wish for nothing, I want only to preserve, and that is the most awful form of worry, as Calderon says so well in his sonnet. Whoever demands something has desire and hope; whoever possesses happiness has only the fear of losing it. A happy person is almost bound to have only apprehensive dreams—that he will lose what he has.”
Tuesday, April 26:
R. began the day with a conversation about the Greek attitude toward love, which we cannot ourselves envisage and which, when it did not degenerate into depravity, produced the highest qualities of aestheticism. “The adoration of women, on the other hand, is a completely new factor, and one which divides us entirely from the antique world. The ancient Germans respected women as something mysterious, closer to Nature—rather in the way the Egyptians worshiped animals—and, in order to preserve their divinity intact, did not wish to touch them. What this cult has led to today, whereby women since chignons and bibi hats have demanded to be adored and from which they derive all this emancipation nonsense—that we already know.” — He goes to work again, for the first time in many days—I with the children. In the afternoon a walk with Loulou and Loldi, who fell in the lake, as she proudly relates. Stop for a rest in the dairy; the children talk of the first cockchafer. In the evening Phaedrus. (Letter from my mother.)