To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Savoia,
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 23, 1938
Dear Cory,
This week my routine, but not my work, has been pleasantly interrupted by a visit from a very old friend, Herbert Lyman, who was in my class at Harvard, with whom I lived for six weeks at Dresden in 1886, and who was always a kindly soul, although long lost in the bog of business. He seemed wizened and dry, physically and morally, and I could glean little from him about affairs in America, except that he thoroughly disapproved of Roosevelt. But we took pleasant walks, I talked a lot, and he had the good sense to go away on the third day, according to the Scriptures, when our fund of reminiscences began to give out. He also had the good sense not to bring his wife and daughter with whom he is travelling, but hastened to rejoin them at Salzburg, for an orgy of music and Germanism.
When S. suggested that you were wasting time seeing the sights, you might have asked if it was not better to perceive than to talk about perception. Or you might have reminded him of the many idle hours he used to spend in front of cafés drinking—one black coffee, and watching the passing—trafficx
Yours affly,
G.S.
x Afterthought:
You don’t drink what there is to drink,
You don’t see what there is to see.
With nothing about which to think
What can the use of thinking be?
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY