Tuesday, March 2:
At breakfast R. tells me that when anything came between us, it was because we loved each other too much and were too dependent on each other. His good fortune, he calls me! He goes off to work on the song with which Wotan wakes the Wala, I to the children; my life consists of bringing up and inking in, in German a play on words: Erziehen und Überziehen.
A violent Föhn wind is raging outside. The market people cannot get across the lake to Lucerne, and wait with their wares in our boathouse; in the end they have to walk into town, carrying all their things, vegetables, poultry, eggs, on their backs.
After lunch we play duets together on the piano, R. and I get much fun from it. R. says in his exhilaration, “What a lucky old donkey I am!,” which makes us laugh a lot.
In the evening with the children I read Shakespeare’s The Tempest. A great and sublimely moral impression from it. The many horrible opera libretti had quite wiped the original poem from my mind; nymphs and specters were all that had remained in my memory. Now it seems to me so clear and so divine! I noticed particularly how uncommonly moderate Shakespeare remains in his use of expressions, as if the eccentricity of the situation and its framework had to be brought into balance by the simplicity of the speech, by which means the artlessness of natural life is also characterized. A less great writer would certainly have portrayed the love scene and Miranda with far more extravagance. Prospero’s burial of his staff, incredibly sublime.
Later R. reads me the 3rd and 4th acts of Antony and Cleopatra. Well, who would dare to say a single word about that! I am utterly shattered. R. finds something of his Tristan reflected in it, inasmuch as it shows a being utterly consumed by love: in Tristan time renders it naive and pure, whereas here it appears in a ghastly, voluptuous setting, yet no less destructively.
Unfortunately R. then brings out Marbach’s adaptation of the Shakespeare play. The tremendous agitation which the poet’s work had brought about now gives way to real merriment. The good man appears to have wanted to civilize Shakespeare!
Inevitably we were led to discuss how Shakespeare’s life must have been: R. came back to his old precept that a poet cannot write about what he is currently experiencing, since he cannot see it clearly enough.
From the post office R. brings a tasteless letter from Mathilde.