To Mary Williams Winslow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co., London
Oxford, England. November 4, 1915
Dear Mrs Winslow,
The children, and what you allow me incidentally to spy of you and your engaging husband, appear to less advantage in their photographs than in my memory. I especially resent seeing little Fred in goggles instead of a nimbus. However, disillusions rain upon us in these days from every side, and you know my philosophy has always been that disillusion is the only safe foundation for happiness. I am therefore waiting sadly for the end of the war; I wish I could go to sleep and wake up at the peace—whatever it may be, so that I might begin at once to readjust myself to fate. Now we don’t know what our fate is—although I have a shrewd suspicion—and the horror of life and the horror of death oppress us together. Extreme situations they say bring out one’s true character; and I am sorry to observe that these overwhelming events make me more selfish than ever. I find myself arguing with myself against my few remaining affections—not that for you and yours, which brings no remorse with it, but my affection for England, for instance, or for the life of reason. I say to myself: “Why do you care for that hopelessly dissolving and unrealizable thing? Why don’t you love the dear good Germans—such well-equipped animals—instead? Why don’t you reconcile yourself fundamentally to everything in this world being unjust, irrational, and ugly? You might then sleep peacefully, and not tremble every morning when you unfold your newspaper”. But it won’t do: I have suppressed the newspaper, as I gather quite enough from posters and conversation and the extras which I can’t always resist buying in the evening; but I can’t suppress the unrest. And what every fresh person tells you who returns from the front is so horrifying—I meet them everywhere—that one is not allowed to forget the troubles of others in one’s own comfortable and stupid routine of life. Some times, when I have written and sent off some article or had a drink (which is not more frequently) I have a moment of peace. Otherwise all is war, war in the world, in the mind, in the heart, in the family—because my sister, who is the nearest person to me now, is a rabid and relentless pro-German. Of course I don’t write to her about the matter, and she probably doesn’t suppose that her way of feeling makes me unhappy, but if I said what I think it would be this: “You imagine that my sympathetic way of tolerating absurdity and fiction in religion will extend to perversity and fiction in politics: but not at all. If one were not governed in religion by emotion and imagination one could have no religion at all—for imagination and emotion are the substance of it. It is to be tolerated and even respected nevertheless, because men have no adequate knowledge and no trained courage in respect to their destiny: they therefore have to make believe something or other, and that is their necessary religion. But politics is a matter of fact, of history, of morals: perversity in that is intolerable. See how people have to die because of it”. But if I said this to my sister she would think it wicked nonsense and be as much distressed about it as I am at the wicked nonsense which she luxuriates in about Germany and England.
About my movements there is little to say. I have found nice lodgings here, I take long walks, often lunching on bread and cheese and a glass of “bitter” at some country inn. Strong is here, also other old and new friends. I don’t do much work, although I am supposed to be writing three separate books. Perhaps you have seen my articles in the “New Republic”. They are my chief sign of life at present. I have also written a sonnet—such a bad, awkward sonnet—for Mrs Wharton’s war book.—Thank you so much for writing.
Yours sincerely
G. Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.