Thursday, April 13:
After a somewhat restless night the sun shines on us again, and we start our day with a conversation about Faust. After I have quoted to him a few things, such as "We made him rich, and now we must amuse him," in which Schopenhauer's saying about neediness or boredom is summarized, he points out how much superior this poem is, on account of its freedom, to that of Dante, who was free only in his personal judgment, but otherwise completely bound by church doctrine. I ask whether it was not the time he lived in that worked to G.'s advantage, and R. replies, "Of course, as I remarked in The Public in Time and Space"-there has never been a greater poet than Dante. He also said, before this, "G. could die in peace after having given us this portrait of the world's triviality and this glorification of love and the Christian idea." "He worked on it long enough," he replies jokingly when I say that without apparently ever having thought much about it, he had absorbed everything down to the smallest detail of Christian symbolism. "And one does not need to search for long-what one needs comes into one's mind of its own accord, one doesn't quite know how. I know something of that from experience." Departure at 5 o'clock after a few difficulties and worries, of which R. tells us at lunch, saying humorously that he had wanted to inquire about the ship but in the end had gone to beer halls with Gravina. The weather is bright, but very windy, and after a few glances at the coast R. withdraws to his cabin. (He told me before this that he has been reading Sophocles's Ajax, and he criticizes the bad habit of bandying maxims about, calling it a mannerism. But he does say, "If only a few MSS. of Aeschylus and Soph. were dug up, instead of all the many statues!") I remain on the upper deck, first with the children; then at last alone, gazing upon a starry night beyond compare, softly glittering, and a phosphorescent sea, till my gazing turns into a prayer. Sailing past Stromboli, Loldi even sees flames. It is after 10 o'clock when I join R. in the cabin; he is not actually sick, but feeling the strain, and he sleeps with interruptions.