Author: David Spiech Page 11 of 283

To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford. March 9, 1919

My own unhappiness about the war disappeared on July 18, 1918, and indeed in a certain sense had disappeared earlier, because although I thought the Germans might win a nominal victory, the Russian revolution seemed to me to have sealed the fate of the German system and its essential ambitions. . . .

Existence is fundamentally in flux—that is a conviction and expectation to start with; and we are merely resuming the movement, perfectly sensible before the war, which is bringing about the dissolution of the age of luxury and respectability in which you and I were born. Let it dissolve! Of course much horror and injustice will be involved in the process—but much would have been involved also in maintaining the old order.

I am not afraid of the people. It is their leaders that are odious, but they will either succumb and be discredited, or they will become fashionable tyrants and patrons of the arts like all the bosses that have preceded them.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. March 8, 1952

Yesterday your friend Loring brought me your letter and “Patterns of Progress” and found me at 11 a.m reading in Lorenzo de’ Medici some musical verses on the diabolical act of Prometheus in bringing fire down to earth with the dreadful consequences of war, trade, and the devouring of cooked carcasses. All fire wills to go heavenward, where according to Aristotle it belongs, and on earth, according to the love-sick Lorenzo, there should be only vegetables and nude Adams and Eves.

I am with you rather than with Lorenzo, not caring at all for love-making in Paradise, but thinking that knowledge both as a means and an end is the best of acquisitions.

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.

To Ezra Loomis Pound
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. March 7, 1940

You and T. S. E. are reformers, full of prophetic zeal and faith in the Advent of the Lord; whereas I am cynically content to let people educate or neglect themselves as they may prefer.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123,
Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 6, 1934

It is also interesting to hear of the cheap edition of “Character & Opinion in the U.S,” to be brought out by the W. W. Norton company. I have always defied pirates, like an elderly female only too willing to be ravished; and it is more than one could expect to find the poacher at last paying for his pickings.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Corliss Lamont
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 5, 1935

The subject of immortality has long ceased to be a living issue with me; and though I know that some people agonize about it, I am confirmed in my old impression that this is a verbal or mythical obsession of the human mind, rather than a literal belief. Everything, in myth and religion must be understood with a difference, in a Pickwickian sense, if we are to understand it truly, and not to import an unnatural fanaticism into the play of poetic fancy. . . .

Orthodox heavens are peaceful: souls are not supposed to change and pass through new risks and adventures: they merely possess, as in Dante, the truth of their earthly careers and of their religious attainment. In other words, souls in heaven are mythical impersonations of the truth or totality of those persons’ earthly life.

. . . this life, and anything truly living, is something dramatic, groping, planning, excited, and exciting. It is dangerous: and Nietsche needn’t have told us to live perilously: it would have been enough to tell us to live.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.