Wednesday, April 27:
Truly awful night, I start up abruptly from sleep three or four times and cry out; in the end I have to get up, R. consoles me. I remember fearfully how I was so violently awoken at the time of Blandine’s death. Who is suffering, who is dying? My father, poor Hans? God protect us! Of R. I can and will not think in this connection; I no longer enjoy hearing the cuckoo, for three years ago he asked it how many years he had to live and received 3 calls in answer. Oh, eternal worry, when will you disappear? Only with life itself.
Nasty, stormy day. Lusch has to stay in bed on account of a cough, and R. has to write letters! Yesterday R. said that he would like to have three little volumes of his essays, in which Art and Revolution would appear. He also said he felt like writing to Ollivier, telling him that “everything they do against the Jesuits, however tyrannical, however despotic, is salutary, but whatever they do with them is ruinous.” He feels that something great might emerge from this plebiscite if one were to put a stop to the eternal talk in the Chamber, were to close it, also withdraw the freedom of the press, for on all this the “priests” were thriving. They should be utterly wiped out, the schools made free, all the people stirred up by the clerics should be shot down, and so on. Read Sicilian fairy tales with the children and in the evening Phaedrus with R. In the course of this R. observes “how lightly people talk of the Greeks and of Platonic love, whereas their world is simply inconceivable and incomprehensible to us unless we completely change our mental outlook, as in the study of philosophy.”