To Mary Potter Bush
9 Ave de l’Observatoire
Paris. June 9, 1914
Your note touches me deeply. I had no idea that you had been so ill, much less that you could take more than the most casual interest in what concerns me. There is no reason why we shouldn’t often meet again, in New York or here. As to happiness I find that it is of two kinds, one the kind we dream of when we are young and vague in our desires, and the other the kind we find possible and suitable to our capacities when we begin to be old and wise. I venture to say that I have attained this second kind of happiness more nearly than most people, and I shouldn’t now exchange it for the other more ideal sort even if it were possible. The secret of it, in my case, lies in the very old but forgotten maxim of not possessing things nor being possessed by them, more than is absolutely inevitable. On that principle, I have made my peace with things, and find my life very acceptable.
Thank you very much for writing as you do and still more for not thinking my resigned philosophy and my selfish existence a blot on the landscape, as I sometimes suspect that most people do. Is it because they see more than we can see, or because they shut their eyes to everything?
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY