Saturday, October 7:
R. slept well, but the weather is still gray. At breakfast we talk about the children.
[Six lines, with words missing and inadequate punctuation, omitted as untranslatable?]
After lunch he tells me that he now always tries to avoid emotion; he says I might have noticed yesterday how close he was to tears during Portia’s scene. Yesterday and today he looked out of the window, regretting that he could not enjoy the sight of his mauve jacket! The Bayreuther Blätter has arrived; he reads Wolz.’s article, notes the error in the nine volumes of Gobineau’s works, but is satisfied with the article. The name Anti-Progress Movement, which he sees in the newspaper, causes him to remark on its absurdity! And recently, when the phonograph was mentioned, he spoke of the foolishness of expecting anything from such inventions; people were turning themselves into machines. Over coffee he recalls Lassalle - I do not know in what connection - and his visit to Starnberg, saying what a poseur he had been, describing him, R., as Siegfried, Frl. v. D[onniges] as Brünnhilde, in order to win him over and, through him, the King. It had all been playacting, and through his vanity in passing himself off as a cavalier and fighting a duel with a cavalier, the demagogue brought about his own ruin. I observe that in such cases the manner of death says nothing, and indeed in general says little; it just says what life has already said. R. agrees with me.
R. goes off to rest and arranges to join us in Saint Mark’s Square; we meet there at half past four after R. has bought some tins of tobacco; in this task he was helped by Biag., who happened to come along, an encounter which reminded him of Palermo and Eva’s birthday. We again return home in two gondolas, and during the ride R. thinks repeatedly of the hook men, as he always does since being told that these were old gondoliers whom the state refused to employ any longer. In the evening he reads to us the quarrel and reconciliation between Brutus and Cassius and remarks how incredible it is, the way Brutus acts out in front of Messala a sort of comedy of stoicism regarding Portia’s death. “One cannot say it is either good or not good - it just is!” “They are all improvisations!” he exclaims, laying the book down. He mentions the question of the reason why - in which he always likes to quote Luther with his rods of Almighty God - as one of the most foolish of questions, and says he has taken good care not to deal with it in his article. The ringing of the church bells opposite brings from him the remark that it must be a lovesick sacristan who is tolling them so haphazardly; we gaily recall Cervantes and his “sacristan of my soul.”