Tuesday, December 19:
What we talked about at breakfast I do not know - oh, God, God, always this picture in my soul! I do not wish to wipe it out - what help is there in such misery? That I can sit beside Eva’s sickbed, that is a great help to me. But lunch - I see my daughter and ask myself how to tell her, how to plunge the knife into her youthful happiness.
The sun is shining, R. wishes me to go out with him, I beg to be allowed to remain at home, this arouses his anger (at lunch he talked about his youth, his grandmother and the robin), we go out. He then goes to rehearsal, I return home to Eva, my gentle support, but I struggle to find comfort, to find God - oh, children, may you never go through hours such as these! R. and the children return from the rehearsal, say it went very well. Shortly before supper R. comes to me in Eva’s room with moist eyes; I have not the strength to respond to his expansive words, and I fear the effect his agitation may have on Eva; he goes off - in an ill humor, it seems to me. At table he says, and I feel only partly in fun, that I hate him; when I pick up his napkin, he says I do it only out of hate. [The whole foregoing sentence obliterated in ink by an unknown hand.] I can scarcely look at Lusch, and in my heart sits the constant companion of all feeling. R. says that Goethe is the greatest of all poets and that he had wished to say something about him to me, but I had not been in the right mood to listen.
Supper is spent in talk about the rehearsal; afterward R. is vexed by conversations with Herr Hausburg and Hump.; he is also annoyed that the matter of the engagement has not been taken up by the gentlemen of the Conservatoire. He leaves the room, I follow him and ask him to tell me now what he wished to say to me; at first he refuses, then he says he has been reading the end of the first and the second part of Faust. Then he talks about “The Singer’s Curse,” which he saw in an illustrated supplement belonging to Georg; he calls it the silliest poem imaginable. I leave him and say good night to my father, and we go to bed, after R. has made further complaints about the rehearsal (though his final movement pleased him, and he talks of the good combination in it). I do not know why - I should have to ask life’s daemons - but bitterness impelled me to say that no poet now means anything at all to me, that poetry seems to me like some wretched plaything.
R. is very angry, accuses me of not understanding him; I immediately follow him into his room and beg his pardon, saying that perhaps, if he were to see inside my heart, he would excuse me. Very emotionally he tells me that I mean everything to him, that without me he is nothing. He says he came home from the rehearsal worn out, forced himself to read these two scenes in order to shut out everything, all feeling, all suffering, and tell himself that the highest being is one transfigured through suffering, is myself! He asked himself, he says, whether he is a bad person, but he is not, and for several days he had kept this news to himself. I beg him for forgiveness and God for mercy! He calms down, goes to bed, falls asleep, while I lie and lie there with this dreadful picture which has haunted me ever since yesterday; at last sleep comes to me, too!