Wednesday, May 25:
Arrival of two pineapples from Paris, we suspect Judith. Letter from Esser (Richter reports that Wüllner is to conduct Die Walküre in Munich!!). Arrival of flowers, the King has sent them. Letter from Eckert; a misunderstanding, his wife was dangerously ill; pleasure at one ill-wisher the less. I write to Dr. Pusinelli about the hanging lamp. Bad news of Prince Wallerstein.
(R. calls me “my good consciousness.”) Worked with the children, R. resumes Götterdämmerung. Drive to inquire about the Prince’s condition. R. writes to Richter, asking him to go to the secretary of the Beethoven Committee and tell him that R. finds it impossible to reply to a letter signed by Messrs. Hanslick and Schelle. In the evening R. remarks that Fidi has literally blossomed in the open air; in the morning he had been so small, in the afternoon in the garden he was strong—“that is how we see it, anyway.” I: “If we see it, then it must be so, for what brings about change in us will also affect the child.” “That is just the problem,” R. replies and, going on from there, explains to me the nature of Schopenhauer’s Will (from Brahma to Buddha), “the urge toward life, then toward knowledge, and finally toward destruction. Remorse—that is to say, the knowledge that inside us something lives which is much more powerful than our idea of evil.” R. spoke for a long time, beautifully and movingly, and I felt as if through him I were penetrating into the secrets of the world, but only through him. Afterward finished Philoctetes, with unbounded admiration.
The letters from the Council amuse us, the discussion on infallibility opened with the following argument: Saint Peter, crucified head downward, provides the symbol of the head bearing the limbs, for “the Sicilians, to whom Saint Peter had preached the doctrine of infallibility, had in their doubt called on the Virgin Mary, who replied that she did in fact remember her son’s declaring Peter to be infallible!”
“The sun shines down on baseness,” says R., reading in the newspapers about the temps de l’empereur.