To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien
3 Prescott Hall
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 26, 1910
Poetry in words, like fiction in life, is something which has ceased to be natural to me…. No doubt the faculty of dreams may be as precious as waking, and less wearisome than insomnia; but when one falls into prose, it is hard to rise again out of it. Another fiction which you amiably weave is the “quia multum amavit” which you apply to me. Any love while we have it seems great; but we must, in retrospect, reduce things to some proportion.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.