>When I remark that nothing really seems to grow in Bayreuth, that they send to Bamberg for all their fruit and vegetables, and add that all Protestant places—places to which people fled, as it were appear to be raw and infertile, R. says: “Yes, and they spur people on; in places where Nature denies him much, the human being becomes significant and greater than Nature. The Athenians had unfruitful Attica, the unproductive soil raised their intellectual powers to the highest, and the Arians, returning from the mountains, found in the rich cradle of humanity people living almost like animals, while they, already developed, created Brahmanism as they dwelt in the rich valleys.” The conversation flowed on, and R.: “Yes, one can only understand one’s life when one is older; when I think what it was that impelled me to sketch Tristan, just at the time of your first visit with Hans to Zurich, while up till then I had been calmly completing the two acts of Siegfried, and when I now look back at the whole chain of events up to the production of Tristan in Munich! In this one can see how everything is metaphysical, and how deceptive the things of which one is conscious can be. How different it will look to someone who can see the whole from the way it looked as it was happening! As with Romeo, the seed of a tremendous passion was being sown, and it appeared in the consciousness as a tenderness toward Rosaline. What is consciousness? The day following an often wretched night, and day time ghosts! And it literally seems as if one can assume that Fate does take care of one, for, looking at my whole life, my marriage with Minna, does not everything look hopeless? And yet the miracle happened, though indeed in a different and more painful way than through annunciations and so on. And I know that, however pleasant I found this kind and sympathetic friendship—someone who would and could care for me—was always close to running away.”