Sunday, December 29:
R. had a good night, but he cannot do much talking; it is a strain on him. “Only Bayreuth and Wahnfried are fit for us” - with this paraphrase of Mephisto’s words about day and night being fit for human beings he concludes the conversation in which we decide how dead the world has become for us, and that there is nowhere we can go without changing our natures.
Yesterday evening we looked at pictures of scholars in an English book about the geologist Murchison. R. remarks: “What an advantage they have over us! They look so proud, so intelligent, if indeed also somewhat foolish, but one can see they don’t work for money.” Curious faces, curious deportment. The faces in the second volume less interesting than the first, “bad and modern,” says R.; there are now the beards he so much hates, and also some Jews among them!
R. does not go out; we spend the evening talking and looking through the Illustrirte and various other things. We begin Calderon’s El verdadero dios Pan but are soon put off by its cold manner of dismissing the deepest mysteries with displays of reason; we shall certainly never take up the autos again.