To Nancy Saunders Toy
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. August 16, 1939
Dear Mrs. Toy,
In a month it seems that you will be leaving Cambridge and that this may be the last letter I shall address to you there. It seems very strange, after so many years when you have been, whether I was there myself or not, the focus of all that was pleasant for me there. And for you, it must be both troublesome and sad—a sort of secondary mixed grief, as at a funeral, where one has to mind externals, under the public eye; whereas the pure grief came earlier, when the mind realized in solitude that a life-long bond was snapped and a change had become inevitable. I hope the material side of this funeral will not tire and distress you too much. The moral part is less intrusive, and can be considered and disposed of at leisure.
Do you remember in Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain the old Mynherr Pepperkorn, who ended his speeches by crying: Erledigt! That word often occurs to me now-a-days, and expresses a great sense of relief. To dispatch something, to have it settled and done for, is a blessed consummation.
By a coincidence, I too am compelled to change my residence—not the town, but the house—because the Hotel Bristol is to be pulled down and rebuilt, the operations being expected to last two years. I expect to go about September 15 to the Grand Hotel—good but old-fashioned, and not one of those frequented by fashionable foreigners; but I may not remain there, and my address had better be C/o B. S. & Co in London, until I settle down in permanent quarters.
I have been having (for me) a great deal of company this summer. Cory has been here for six weeks, taking his meals with me, although living at another hotel; and an Italian admirer of my books, whom I call “Settembrini” (again after the Magic Mountain) walks with me every other afternoon. He is a professor of Italian in Berlin, but a sworn enemy of both governments, and a person of exactly Settembrini’s mentality. How he takes to my writings is a mystery, but he does.
The war-scare is not so much cultivated in Italy as in France and England, but foreigners have almost ceased to come here: not altogether a disadvantage for the lover of distinct milieux, but a woe for the hotelkeepers. Cortina, however, is crowded at this moment (the peak of the season) with Italians and transient Germans, and there is plenty of motoring, mountain-climbing, ladies in trousers, and good cheer.
My nephew’s son, Robert Shaw Sturgis, named after my brother, has finished his school-days at St. Mark’s but is too young to go to College, and is to be in Europe this winter learning languages. They talk of letting me see him in Rome, which would awaken in me a grand-fatherly emotion never yet experienced.
May you be content, if not happy, in your new home.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA