Sunday, July 2:
Wrote to Clemens Brockhaus and settled all sorts of business matters. Family lunch in the garden; R. in a good mood, has been working. After reading my letter to Clemens, he says: “You understand me only too well; this desolation when I think of my life, this absence of all traces! I find it horrible.” R. considers Herr Fuchs’s pamphlet to be very good.
We spend all day in the garden. Fidi’s mission in life? R. says he often thinks that, were he to die suddenly, his work would be uncompleted; who would finish it for him? It would not be too inconceivable that Fidi might have the same gifts as himself and might continue his life. I have my doubts, not believing in so swift a recurrence of genius, since there is no instance of it anywhere in history; I shall be happy if our son has a steadfast character and enlightened intelligence. “Yes,” R. says, “for he would possess no individuality of his own if he were simply to follow in my footsteps. God knows what lies ahead for him.”
I said that at the end of June we had celebrated the seventh year of our love. “Not that,” R. said, “and also not its explosion, but the knowledge that we could no longer live apart from each other. And if Hans had been only a shade different, more trivial or more profound, we should not have been completely united, for what did we not attempt on his account?”
We wander through the Tribschen grounds and settle down on the hill beside the hermitage, watching the curious cloud formations, in which a thunderstorm lurks. “We newer races are very restricted in our imaginings, not knowing the tropical regions, India, for example. How can I think of the God Thor behind Mount Pilatus? These myths all originated in the Himalayas.” We come to the subject of the Egyptians, the veneration of the Nile and of the cow, and that leads us to Io and the curious dialogue between her and Prometheus. “The reason why the Greek legends have made such an impression on you is that they were seized on by such tremendous poets.”
We see a cow in the meadow, and R. points out to me how it moves just like a snake, the same stretching and elongating. A lovely moment in time, Richard! Life is beautiful after all. My exclamation brings Schiller’s Don Carlos to my mind, the beauty of which, with its delicate and subtle language, its dignified tone, R. finds really unique. “Where did Schiller find his model for it? At most Shakespeare’s Henry VIII could have served, but that play was not known then.”
I do some copying; R. corrects the proofs of his biography. “My life,” he exclaimed, “has so far not achieved the C major finale to the C Minor Symphony. Everything I can remember is trivial.” After supper we sit on the steps in front of the house, gaze at the moon, gloriously reflected, and listen to a curious summer-night concert: frogs, cicadas, and toads, the last in the distance, like a chorus of the damned. The frog is the hero, and he makes himself very audible; the others are like a symphonic accompaniment.
R. then plays some passages from Euryanthe, and the day ends with a few pages of Carlyle, always welcome. During our meal the bird struck up again as it did recently, whereupon R. says, “One can understand why poor lonely Siegfried listens to the birds in the forest, and it is his good fortune that the bird takes care of him; in this world we remain strangers eternally.”