Sunday, December 4:
Letter from M. Meysenbug, and fear that I am pregnant. R. has a cold and is despondent; a conversation which touched on the King yesterday has deeply upset him; the thought that “his work, his highest ideal, should be trampled underfoot to earn him his bread,” depresses him, just as publications like Strauss’s Voltaire annoy him, the contemporary world appears grotesque to him, and, as he confesses to me, he is now painfully aware of how much the world resembles a lunatic asylum. He forces himself to work. At lunch he exclaims: “What is the thing written down as compared with the inspiration? What is notation in comparison with imagination? The former is governed by the specific laws of convention, the latter is free, boundless. That is the tremendous thing about Beethoven, that in his last quartets he was able to remember and record improvisations, which could only be done through art of the highest, highest order. With me it is always the drama which flouts convention and opens up new possibilities.” — I think I understand him, for the relationship of the written to the improvised is the same as speech to emotions. I could never express what is stirring my emotions at the present time, I feel as if my heart had been broken into pieces, and love, like a bird used to a cage, is fluttering around, knocking against everything, wounding itself—want so much to express it now, but I just cannot! — Loldi doing a bear’s dance, Eva leaping like a poodle to Richter’s fiddling; Loldi amuses us with her affected speech, she talks as if she really spoke another language and had learned German quite separately.
Prof. Nietzsche sends us Burckhardt’s book on the Renaissance and a little treatise by Prof. Czermak on Schopenhauer’s color theory; we read it during the evening, and R. is annoyed by the peculiar arrogance scientists show toward philosophers. He remarks, “Realists and idealists—they are and always will be worlds apart, but only the idealist can ignore the realist, never the other way around.” And: “The scientist says, as it were: I, the individual, am nothing, but my science is infallible, and by being a part of it I am able to look down on the greatest philosophers.” — The printed Beethoven has arrived. Sending copies off (wrote the poem to Hans).