To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 28, 1932
I don’t see Boylston or Elsie very often; she has been ill, and we never particularly liked each other: but she seems to me mellowed and sweetened by age, although her voice and her nervousness still rub me the wrong way. Boylston is disconcerted by the way the world is going, not in business so much as in general manners, morals, and ideas. He is a conservative by temperament and would like to live under Queen Anne, as I under the Emperor Augustus: but my aspiration, being more speculative and distant, gives me less trouble. I am not a conservative at all. Things as they are now please me much better than things as they were fifty years ago: and the future, though we can’t tell what it will be, doesn’t scare me. In fact, if I couldn’t have been born 2000 years earlier, I shouldn’t mind having been born 100 years later. It’s running a risk, but worth it.
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