Monday, January 4:
Monday has always been my bad day. Evchen ill again, servants’ carelessness! My great concern about this coupled with some indecision, for it is not easy to make changes in the household. Patience and increased care on my part are called for. A letter from Hermine: the children there are well, they had a merry Christmas; melancholy pleasure in that.
Spent the morning in the children’s room, except for the hour in which R. read me his essay as a connected whole. This pleasure banished my worried mood at once. In the afternoon with the children; again much bother, for Evchen had inadvertently been given some milk, which again brought on tummy ache. However, she does not look too bad and has no temperature; she is also cheerful.
I write to Hermine and Mathilde Maier so as not to give way to depression. A great longing for Loulou, who is perhaps missing me. Took up again the cantos of Homer which we read yesterday; a feeling that the book refuses to come to life when the Friend is not reading it out loud to me. To me the whole world is recognizable only in him and through him.
At R.’s wish the children are being given a second room; the move unsettles me, as does any outward change, however small. After tea Richard plays for me the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, which the Signale once described as “crudely sensual”! Deeply moved by it, indeed hardly in control of myself. At such moments I can think of nothing else but Elsa’s words, Dich möchte ich zum Tode gehen [“For you I would willingly lay down my life”], and even these I am unable to utter.
Afterward two cantos from the Odyssey, Polyphemus and Circe; great delight in the former. Circe, however, whom we accompanied with punch, sent us to sleep. Genelli’s Homer designs now no longer attract me; they are totally lacking in naïveté, even if the conception is frequently brilliant. Completely different pictures arise in our minds when we read this magnificent poem. At eleven Richard goes to his apartment; I go to bed, blessing the children.