To Boylston Adams Beal
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 7, 1934
Thank you for your letter of Dec. 7 and for the cutting from the Harvard Register. Please don’t trouble about looking up those other birthday tributes: they are too much like obituary notices. Unless my “novel” should ever be finished and published, which might make a real flame burst out one way or the other, I can imagined the kindly sunset glow in which, at least in public, I shall be allowed to sink into oblivion. But I still have a string or two to my bow, which not all my American friends are aware of; I don’t mean only the “novel”, but fresh philosophic criticism and exposition. It all depends on my powers of work not failing too fast.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.