To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Jan. 18, 1932
Dear Mrs. Toy,
What you say about Miss Hopkinson–anent my trouble with Strong, about which you are most sympathetic and wise–reminds me of something in one of the Trivia booklets of Logan Pearsall Smith: namely, that when people have been friends for forty years, distance and mercy alone can save the situation–or something to that effect: I am not quoting his words. We old people (though you are evidently an exception) live more and more on our old stock of principles and impressions: anything else–including our best friends–seems wrong and unnecessary. We haven’t vitality enough to lend to a life at all different from our own: we hate it, and malign it. Hence this strange hostility in our old friends. As you say, it needn’t kill old affection or produce a rupture: we too can get on without that inner sympathy which seemed so precious when we were younger: we can get on very well alone with the Alone. (You know these are the last words of the Enneads of Plotinus.) Since I wrote about the matter, my relations with Strong have become more normal again. He keeps writing about his own achievements, which now include poetry. I enclose his last, which I think is also the best. What do you think of it? But I am afraid I must have said something misleading about Cory. He wasn’t at all to blame: perhaps not guarded enough in repeating things said to him unguardedly, but otherwise not at all treacherous to either of us. On the contrary, I think it is our fault if his position is rather difficult and he isn’t earning his own living.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928-1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA