To Page Smith
Rome. June 8, 1948
Dear Prexy,
It was pleasant to receive your letter and poem, informing me that the O.K. has been resurrected. I was not aware that it had died, except as in the course of fifty years such a gathering, even if it retains the same name, must more than once give up the ghost. The spirit of Harvard, undergraduate and official, seems to one of my generation to be changed, in the sense that it has carried out completely the ideal of President Eliot, to make it an integral part, and a servant, of the contemporary world. But in my time there still stirred in some of the Clubs and in some literary circles, like the O.K. and the Harvard Monthly, a certain speculative and moral freedom. We still dared to prefer the end of life, realizable in every free and happy moment, to the means of keeping the world going faster and faster in an unknown direction. Of course, it must move on, and we with it; but we may sometimes look out of the window from the aeroplane.
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown