Wednesday, October 25:
R. had a somewhat restless night. I dreamed about a garden in which I was strolling behind R. and saw two lovely big butterflies, which I wanted to show him.
R. gets up in somewhat low spirits, we talk about life, and I ask him if he does not also feel that, if Kleist had known the teachings of Buddha and Schopenhauer, he would have lost his leanings toward suicide. He replies, 'Yes.' At breakfast R. talks about a shot of some kind, I mention the scene in Tell: 'That is what one can point out to Gobineau as Germanic, this Swiss self-sufficiency; everything else - imperial, royal pomp - is not.'
We part; shortly afterward the mail arrives, R. comes in to find out if there is news from V. and Batz, discovers me reading, I am unable to conceal from him that our friend Gobineau, the dearest of them all, has died.... This dominates our day - we would find it impossible to talk to others about it.... I go out with Siegfr.; some time after one o'clock I come upon him on the path outside our house. 'When one has at last encountered something, it slips like water through one's fingers' is what he says after a while, and we retrace together the signs which pointed toward this death, the restlessness, the haste, wherever he might be, to get away, and in the end this utterly solitary death.
When we met R. on the broad path, R.'s nerves were so on edge, probably because of the news, that he was quite unable to bear the tapping of the women's clogs, which he compared to castanets. He also dislikes the sirocco air.... At lunch R. suddenly strokes his nose, in the way our friend did when he was enjoying a private joke! In the afternoon he brings home for me a lovely promenade fan and a notebook with a swallow. The day is spent in efforts to bear up against the blow. 'One feels so useless, so superfluous!' R. exclaims as we are talking of Gob.'s indifference toward his works.... And again and again during the day we keep coming back to this incomparable man, until in the evening R. plays the first bars of 'Siegfried's Funeral March!'... Then R. reads Palestrina's Mass for Pope Marcellus, finds it lacking in invention, and says that anyway he hates this version of the Mass, this credo in which all the stanzas (and what stanzas!) are composed with the fear of Hell always firmly in mind!