To Max Forrester Eastman
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1.
Rome. November 28, 1936
Dear Mr. Eastman,
Your letter reaches me when I had just written to your publishers saying I was ashamed to confess that I couldn’t understand a word of your book. If I had been writing to you I should have expressed the matter differently. I can understand your own words, and no doubt I should see a part, at least, of your reasons for making the distinctions you make in the kinds of the comic. My difficulty is with this comic universe itself. There is where everything eludes me in so far as it is supposed to be comic and in so far as the comic is supposed to be a part of the good. To me all these jokes seem rather ghastly. And the enjoyment of laughter, rather than a painful twist and a bit of heart-ache at having to laugh, perhaps, at such things at all, being your whole subject, I say I don’t understand a word of your book. That is, I am not able to share the happy experience that inspires you to write it.
Never mind. You are probably in the same case (although you don’t say so) about my “Realm of Essence.” Why trouble about it? No one is going to hell, or even to the stake, for being a victim, in some direction, of “invincible ignorance.”
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington.