To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Palazzo della Fonte
Fiuggi, Italy. July 24, 1941
Dear Clemens:
I have two cards of yours with complimentary suggestions. I am sensible of the compliments, but I think the suggestions had better not be carried out, at least not at present.
First, you propose a book to mark my 78th birthday.1 I am sure nobody wants to contribute to such a book and nobody wants to read it. Why should you employ your undoubted abilities in order to get the unwilling to write and the unwilling to buy, if not to read? Put it off at least until my death or until my 80th birthday, when perhaps the air will be purer.
Secondly, you propose to dedicate your “new book” to me. I don’t know what book this is to be, and whether it at all requires or suggests such a dedication. Wouldn’t it be better at present to let me remain in the background?
You know, I suppose, that I am not an American citizen, but have always retained my Spanish Nationality. There is therefore no reason why I should be driven from Italy, except that my money has been stopped or “frozen”. If I can get it more easily in Switzerland or Spain, I may have to go soon to one or the other country. Until October I am all right here.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana
1. The Winter-Spring 1942 (vol. V, no. 1) issue of The Mark Twain Quarterly marked Santayana’s seventy-eighth birthday. This issue features a saying composed by Santayana for the Mark Twain Society’s Greeting Book: “One of the best fruits of reason is to perceive how irrational we are: laughter and humility can then go together”.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Seven, 1941-1947. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC