Friday, September 1:
R. exclaims to me in the morning, “You know nothing at all; you don’t know how I suffer when you are not there; with Bismarck I should have found a way of furthering my cause if you had been there, for together with you everything, without you nothing; that’s how it is.”
Fidi gives us great joy. R. says, “He will be all right; I am a kind of Siegmund, for whom there are always obstacles, he will have Goethe’s world-conquering quality.” As he passes a hand over his forehead I ask him if anything is the matter. “My thoughts are itching.” He works.
We expect Lothar Bucher for lunch, but he does not come. At table R. says to me: “I have been thinking again about actors, poets, and so on, and have even made some notes on the subject in my sketchbook. An improviser such as an actor must belong entirely to the present moment, never think of what is to come, indeed not even know it, as it were. The peculiar thing about me as an artist, for instance, is that I look on each detail as an entirety and never say to myself, ‘Since this or that will follow, you must do thus and such, modulate like this or like that.’ I think, ‘Something will turn up.’ Otherwise I should be lost; and yet I know I am unconsciously obeying a plan. The so-called genius of form, on the other hand, reflects, ‘This or that follows, so I must do such and such,’ and he does it with ease.”
Visit from Count Bassenheim, who gives us another shock with the news that the King has ordered a coronation carriage with six pictures from the Bible and six allegories about Louis XIV, for 20,000 florins. R. says we shall certainly soon receive news from that quarter of sudden insanity or death; deep concern, we will be without house or home.
R. goes to town and returns home with a Herr Hey, who wants to force his singing method on him at all costs; he is very agitated by this foolish interruption. After the good man has gone, R. tells me that he has had a dreadful scene with Eglin, the stationer, who had been unutterably rude and had even shouted after R. in the street, “May you suffer homesickness wherever you go!” God knows who or what so stirs up these people against him. R. has been buying paper there for the past five years and is, if anything, too good to them; he was not satisfied with the sorts of paper, and then they behave thus. R. does not wish ever to go to Lucerne again.