Thursday, December 8:
Letter from Dr. Heigel, who sends me his poem “Die Majorin.” Report from the publisher that Beethoven is practically sold out. Another letter from Dr. Herrig about Beethoven. R. reads it slowly, he says he always seeks to immerse himself in such a personality. One can see, he adds, that Dr. H. has always gathered his impressions from books, never directly. Concern about the Jews seems unbounded, R. says. A letter from Herr W. Marr claiming that Opera and Drama has taken complete possession of him, is evidence of the same concern. Nice letter from the publisher Schott, saying that at the beginning of the war he had the impression that people were trying to liberate themselves from Verdi and Offenbach; the German nation, however, did not possess that amount of strength. Family lunch. Snow flurries, Grane ill, R. and I walk into town.
In the evening more Strauss; the analysis of Voltaire’s philosophical writings makes us remark how sad it is to see such a mind as V.’s involving itself in such torments of inextricable confusion by always seeking in outward things the explanation which can never come from outside. The Indians, says R., understood that; their Brahma myth is a symbolic interpretation of the world; by exaggerating the space relationships, for example, they produce the concept of spacelessness. How this wisdom continues increasingly to astonish me—beside it we look like barbarians!