Tuesday, May 31:
When we were talking yesterday evening about the transmigration of souls, R. cried: “Thank God this is all a deep mystery, otherwise mankind would by now have put it all on an official basis. ‘You will become a bird, you a dog,’ a policeman would tell us.”
In the morning R. receives me wearing a tail coat and a stand-up collar—“since you like formality so much.” The children say he looks like “a gentleman.” At eleven o’clock arrival of the painter Kietz; much confusion; from the lunchtime conversation I remember R.’s words to Kietz: “You say painters stand closer to Nature than musicians. Nonsense, a baby cries before it sees, and we hear this cry.”
Herr Kietz says of Fidi, “He has a sword in his eyes.”
In the evening we are rather tired from so much talking and listening; the May wine helps a little, but we are off our usual track. It has an odd effect on me, I relapse more and more into silence and feel that I am incapable of sustaining any sort of contact with other people; my mood becomes despondent, indefinable fears oppress me, my heart is like a creature in flight. By chance I read that the drought in Florence is so severe that it has led almost to starvation; this brought me into a state of grief and alarm, speaking is no help, all that helps is the communion with great minds in the company of R. When I retired to my room yesterday evening, I had to take up the correspondence of Goethe and Schiller in order to calm my spirits. A feeling of quiet resignation took possession of me—let come what must!
Talking about R.’s friend, the philologist Lehrs, Kietz told us that Lehrs had once asked him to light a fire and had scolded him for having no sense of architecture; Kietz had then laid the fire according to his instructions (L. could no longer rise from his chair); before the fire had burned halfway down, Lehrs himself had expired! (Concern over Loulou’s headache.)