To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Savoy,
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. August 25, 1935
Your maturing ideas about your novel seem to me excellent, and I hope when you come to the end you will make the solution genuine, and not merely perfunctory, or as you say, to please the ladies. A man doesn’t want to be possessed by his wife, or by anything else, but he wants, if he is normal, to be devoted. Freedom and self-expression eat themselves up, and become nothing, unless we find persons or arts or ambitions that we can live for whole-heartedly.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003. Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.