To Ira Detrich Cardiff
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 12, 1948
Dear Mr. Cardiff, Your letter and the selections enclosed make me very hopeful of the value of the whole collection proposed. They also give me a salutory view of my own foibles, because many of these sayings show a bias which I had forgotten that I ever had. I mean that they are preponderantly anti-traditional and anti-clerical. I still agree with what I say there, yet I shouldn’t now say it in that tone; and I now feel too ignorant of “science” — and too much puzzled by it to appeal to it, in the 19th century way, as to a well-known fountain of truth and light. However, littera scripta manet, and it is right that you should choose these old jibes, as they seem to please you and as they evidently pleased me. I should make only one suggestion: Don’t include anything merely for being true. It must not be commonplace … I was also much pleased that you took things from “The Last Puritan” and from “Persons & Places”. The longish passage from Mr. Boscovitz’s mouth about religions, jewels, flowers and women makes me feel hypocrital; those are distinctly his sentiments rather than mine. But I wrote them and like them better than my own usual feelings. Do put that passage in. And if you have not chosen it already, please put down Mario’s where he tells Oliver that he doesn’t “make up” the stories he relates but that “we must change the truth a little in order to remember it.” That is cynicism without bias, and psychologically exact.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Eight, 1948-1952. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY