To Lawrence Smith Butler
Palazzo della Fonte
Fiuggi, Italy. July 3, 1941
I see by your note-paper that you are a bona fide professional architect now, which sounds more serious than your love-making or even your music. I am glad you keep up all these humanistic interests. The great satisfactory thing about you as a friend (as I will say if I get to you in my Memoirs) has been that you are always the same. Most men–this is less true of the ladies–in America lose their youth and their liberty at 25: they are thereafter just what a German philosopher named Jaspers pretends that we all are: our situation personified. But you young men were such nice company in America because you were not your situation personified since as yet you had no situation: you were yourselves and you had Lebensraum about you: athletics, music, society, books: and the nice ones, like you, also religion, friendship, and family life. You have kept more of this freedom than other men of your time; and you would be as good company now as you were in 1898; whereas your contemporaries, almost all of them, would be, from my point of view, ciphers. Of course I know they might personify an important situation. But I don’t want to talk to a situation. I want to talk to a man in that situation.
My situation at this moment is rather strange. I am rather well off, but threatened with starvation, because it seems that all credits belonging to foreigners, at least to Europeans, have been “frozen”, and all my money is in America! I have enough on hand to last into the autumn, and I hope that by that time my nephew will have got a licence to send me funds as usual: otherwise, Goodbye.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Seven, 1941-1947. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The University Club, New York NY