Tuesday, November 14:
R. slept well; in the morning, our desire to accept the invitation to go to Bologna, combined with uncertainty about my father’s arrival, leads us to the latter’s life, his attitude toward us: it is not satisfactory. Quite different our review of our good friend Gobineau’s life! R. is reading the history of the Persians with great interest, and he tells me something from it which he feels explains everything: that once upon a time the Persians regarded everything as sacred, water, stone, everything; that, as time went on, they no longer worked themselves, yet despised those they had enslaved all the more for working for them and doing work, such as splitting stones, which they themselves were unwilling to do. He goes out to get some money, but finds the air unpleasant. In the afternoon he was much annoyed about the wine bill from Bordeaux which has been shown him, and much of the evening is taken up with the ensuing confusion. (At lunch we talked a lot about the history of Venice, which I am reading with the children.)
But gradually we turn to other subjects; I say something about my reading of Macbeth - for example, the reasons the murderers give for being prepared to perform such deeds. R. says: “Yes, no attention is ever given to the degeneration need gives rise to. People just say, ‘He is a rogue,’ but how he became one, what despair can lead to - that is not investigated at all.” At supper the Jewish problem is also discussed once more, the dispossession of the peasants, the rampant usury. Then R. reads to me from the newspaper a cry of woe about Transvaal, and he exclaims, “That is why I curse Bismarck for dealing with all these very important problems like a Pomeranian Junker.” [In the foregoing sentence the word “curse” obliterated in ink by an unknown hand and replaced by “deplore.”] And we pass on to music! R. plays some of the A Major Sonata and expresses his amazement at the nondescript character of the canon, whereas the march itself is so splendidly brimful of ideas; when I ask him what led to this sudden flying up, he replies with a laugh, “Just that nothing else occurred to him.” After we have gone up to bed, he begins: “The first movement of this A Major Sonata is an excellent example of what I mean by unending melody - what music really is. The change - four bars here, boom-boom, then another four bars - is extremely clumsy. But Beethoven is unique in that respect.” As an example of unendingness I cite Bach. “Yes,” says R., “and what is all the more curious is that it is actually done without melody. Indeed, one can even say that compared with it the square melody is a decline. And these miracles on the clavicembalo from that poor fellow in a wig - it’s incredible.” He ends with a joke: “Luther held table conversations, we hold bed conversations.”