Saturday, October 14:
R. did not have a good night; the sirocco, and perhaps also the ices yesterday, did not agree with him. But at breakfast he is cheerful, and he sings, to the tune of the duet between Valentine and Marcel, the words “Qui n’a pas l’esprit de son âge, de son âge a tous les malheurs.”
But around noon, when I go to fetch him, he is having a spasm. However, he soon recovers and goes out with me. After he has told me that he finds W. Scott’s The Pirate boring, we start to talk about the book on Buddha, and R. says that the credit for having discovered and clearly expressed the truth that the world as we see it is a figment of our imagination, for having defined its complete ideality, belongs in fact to Kant, “the most original of minds,” as Schop. put it.
We make several purchases, from the baker among others, since the bread is still not coarse enough for R.’s taste, and return home for lunch. When I contemplate my happiness directly, realize what it is to be with him like this, undisturbed, unconcerned, then I take fright; my unworthiness threatens to destroy me, I become conscious that in all legends the divine can be seen only through a veil, and I feel like holding back every breath I take on my own so that he, and he alone, can reign supreme. And pray that the world, alas, may not cast its shadow over us!
After lunch R. asks me to read a review of Jules Verne’s latest book, in which the Germans are ridiculed in the most tasteless way. Toward 4 o’clock our friend [Mimi] Schleinitz pays us a visit, which R. finds very agreeable. We take her back to the P. Malipiero in a gondola, Siegf. rowing, and from there we return home, are caught in the rain, take a gondola at the Rialto, and arrive home virtually unscathed.
In the evening we are visited by Dr. Thode; R. reads to us a letter in which Bismarck completely deserts his friend Puttkamer in the matter of the new orthography and comes out against Roman type. This provides an opportunity for a discussion about our present political world. The sounds of the “Pilgrims’ Chorus” then come to us - after we have moved into the smoking niche on account of an accident with a lamp - as a salvation!
(When, having returned from our afternoon outing, I go to write in my diary, I find in my little notebook R.’s joke about Les Huguenots; I ask him to write it down, which he kindly does.) At supper we have to laugh heartily about what R. tells us. Siegfried asked him, “Papa, what does ‘colic’ mean?” R.: “Tummyache. Where did you find it?” Siegfr.: “In Coriolanus”!
When, beneath the Rialto, we were talking about the “thing-in-itself,” as R. puts it, R. says how well the Buddhists defined the sufferings of the world: “To part from those one loves, to live with those one hates.” Here it occurs to me that R. recently remarked that he would not compose anything on the subject of Buddha, since he is unfamiliar with the images - mango tree, lotus flower, etc. - and in consequence the text would be bound to sound artificial. In the evening he talks to Stein and me about race and loveless marriages, and asks what could possibly come of a marriage between the German Emperor and his wife, who, though she is handsome and blooming, he did not love; this point is always ignored in any discussion of race, he says.