To Miriam Thayer Richards
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. February 7th 1952
You are much nearer in Cambridge now than I am to “happy snowflakes dancing” and even to my beautifully edited “Essays”, which I had never heard of. My memory for current minor events is much worse than for incidents in my life in the 1890’s, which seem to be, in retrospect, the vital period in it. Someone may have written to me for my consent to collect these “Essays” of which you tell me. I should naturally have consented; but I have forgotten the matter altogether. But not long ago a visitor brought me a copy of “The Sense of Beauty” to autograph, and I was dazzled by the size and elegance of my first-born little girl. This is not the case with all my progeny, some being very shabby and others buried; but I have had the satisfaction of seeing my favourite child, “Dialogues in Limbo” reappearing in its original type, with additions perfectly prepared to suit. And Scribner is planning an abridged edition of “The Life of Reason”, in one volume, which will be made by my friend and occasional secretary, Mr. Daniel Cory, and which I perhaps may not live to see.
Your name and your letter instantly turned my thoughts to Mrs. Toy, who so often and so affectionately used to speak of you. Her letters in her later years, and what I heard about her, which was very little, left a rather sad impression, as if her health and spirits suffered in solitude from the absence of the duties and pleasures of her former life. This was not a matter on which I could speak sympathetically, solitude being for me a sort of liberty realized; but of course it could not have been so unless I had a private picture gallery of friends and places in my head, to be revisited always with increased pleasure. It amuses me to read in the papers sometimes that I am now a recluse. It is accidentally a literal truth, because I seldom go about, on account of my bad sight and hearing, which makes crossing the city traffic dangerous; but I was never more conscious (or studious) of what goes on in the world, and there is nothing monastic about my daily life, in spite of living in a nursing home where the sister’s are nuns. But I see only one of them, the housekeeper, often, and almost all my visitors bring the air of free (but now pre-occupied) America with them.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.