To Mary Potter Bush
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome, March 21, 1945
I have been, as you doubtless, know, reviewing the past not so much sentimentally as egotistically, for my retrospective pleasure: much purer than was the pleasure of living through the actual events.
. . . . This war disturbed me much less than the other: this was not a competition between rivals for the same things, but a shock between people with different objects in view. And the end seems to promise a more enlightened reconstruction than followed upon the other war.
. . . . I hope that, like me, you are finding the evening of life the pleasantest part of it.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Seven, 1941-1947. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY