To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. April 2, 1940
William Lyon Phelps says that I don’t love life; and here I am enjoying life almost uninterruptedly, in spite of old age with its little ailments, in spite of solitude, and in spite of the alarms and inconveniences of the troubled times. I ought to love life and you ought to hate it, but la raison n’est pas ce qui règle l’amour whether of life or of anything else. And we have to suffer for loving. I say in my new book (I am now correcting the proofs) that the spirit prefers to suffer rather than not to care; and that happens to you for having too much spirit—I mean more than can nestle comfortably in our mediocre world.
. . . My whim in spending the winter in Venice couldn’t have been more ill-timed; the winter has been horrible. . . . The sun has hardly shown its face: and what is Venice without sun-light? However, I have stuck it out and on the whole have done pretty well: better than last summer. I have finished The Realm of Spirit, written a . . . good part of my contribution to Schilpp’s book (about my philosophy) and also scribbled away at my autobiography, describing the Sturgis family in the old days. But this entertainment is now interrupted by proof-reading and the gradual arrival of the critical articles that I must reply to in Schilpp’s symposium. I have also not had much to read: little but war books announced in the Times Literary Supplement; but in the shop windows here, although Venice is such a non-literary place I have spied and fished out Montaigne and Nietzsche’s Gaia Scienza (this in a French translation), both excellent stop-gaps. Montaigne is of course a capital rogue: prose still decorative and eloquent; but Nietzsche on the whole inspires more respect: more incisive, braver, more unhappy.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937–1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.