Wednesday, November 23:
Again spent the morning in the garden; from the heights of the hermitage our promontory always presents a smiling, companionable aspect; to return home to this house, which contains everything that I love, is a divine feeling. Our quiet yet so busy life fills me with pleasure.
This morning at breakfast R. said to me, “You will always be a maiden, that is your true age—every person has an age when he is wholly what he is meant to be.” I laugh and say that in that case I am an old maid.
R. is making sketches for the second act of Götterdämmerung, but he does not wish any notice to be taken of it. “Otherwise I lose the urge.” I notice it from his agitated mood. But toward me he is always unutterably kind.
Richter, with his violin, pretends to the children that he is a water sprite; much jubilation. In the evening Hoffmann’s story is read to the finish without particular enjoyment.
In the afternoon a Beethoven sonata (Opus 96) with Richter; R. says that when playing the piano I look too serious, my eyes turn brown, and I become so immersed in it that he feels afraid of me! I almost regret having played, concerned that it might not be what he really wants, though he himself requested it.
Thursday, November 24:
Saint Catherine’s Day, the feast of virgins; splendid weather, blooming roses and sunshine. R. exclaims in the morning that he has had a lively vision of Fidi as a youth. “Even if he does not excel in any one direction he is bound, with his big head and his sturdy character, to be quite a tremendous fellow. Then he will bring off all the things I was unable to do.”
Thinking of my childhood yesterday (how Richter with his violin upstairs reminded me of Jozy, the gypsy my father adopted, who was always fiddling to us children), I voiced the opinion that happiness in childhood bears the same relation to happiness in life as Paradise to redemption.
R. composing. In the evening a letter from Prof. N., who announces his arrival on Saturday and is terribly pessimistic with regard to Germany. A letter in the newspaper from Carlyle pleases us greatly, he describes the gesticulating French precisely as they are.
Read Goethe in the evening: “Shakespeare and No End” and the essay on [Calderon’s] La hija del aire. The distinction he draws between Sh[akespeare] and Calderon pleases me greatly—the one the fresh grapes, the other the finished wine.