Tuesday, July 25:
A dream of R.’s brings us to the subject of love. He told me that in his dream we had been separated, Hans had been delighted, R. had wanted to go away, and I had let him go; it had been the unhappy time in Munich. Then he adds, “Yes, love up to the point of complete union is just suffering, yearning.” I: “And complete union achieved only in death, the whole of Tristan is saying that; this is what I constantly feel, I feel myself as an obstacle which I long to burst through. And yet I want as an individual to be united with you in death, how can one explain this?” R.: “Everything that is remains; what one already has persists, freed entirely from the conditions of its occurrence.”
I: “One has in the stars a good image for the appearance of things; as our eyes deceive us there, so, too, do our senses deceive us about the whole system of existence.” R.: “The word ‘eternal’ is a very fine one, for it really means ‘holy’: a great feeling is eternal, for it is free from the laws of change to which everything is subject; it has nothing to do with yesterday, today, or tomorrow. Hell begins with arithmetic.” “But God knows what else may still become associated with you?” R.: “Nothing, for I have believed in nothing deeply except you.”
Yesterday I brought from Countess Bassenheim a spiked helmet and a saber for Fidi; he comes to us with them: “Achilles, Max Piccolomini.” He looks very good in it and makes us feel happy. From Berlin, Herr Davidsohn sends us an article about Tausig, very insipid and flat. “But we cannot say anything about it, no one would understand our point of view,” says R. “He was altogether an unfortunate, interesting phenomenon.”
R. does not work today; he is too worn out. He plays the two scenes for me, then lies down and reads. He says he would like to take a few days’ break and write an obituary of Auber. Yesterday morning I wrote seven letters in connection with Bayreuth. Loldi on the American, who is bald: “He has something naked on his head.”
Melancholy in Nature and in myself; since Tausig’s death I have no will for anything but business matters and the children’s lessons. I just cannot manage to write personal letters. In the evening I again read to R.; the emigration of the Salzburgers under Friedrich Wilhelm I moves us unutterably and strengthens me in any resolve to become a Protestant. R. regrets that Bismarck does not find the necessary drastic words in relation to the Catholics.