Author: David Spiech Page 110 of 283

To Robert Seymour Bridges
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. August 15, 1924

Your boldness in going to America at all rather astonished me, but once having taken the plunge I can well imagine that you found it tolerable, and even appealing to that vague tenderness for mankind which I suppose is in all our hearts. Often, in these hotels in which I live, I am annoyed at the American parties that loudly take possession of the next table, and deluge me with commonplaces and bad slow jokes, and then, if something obliges me to “make their acquaintance” and, as it were, to become one of their party, I immediately lose all consciousness of their trying tones and sentiments, and am entirely absorbed by a sort of contagious kindness and hearty simplicity which reigns among them. . . .

You speak of my “desertion of England”. I don’t feel that I have deserted: I have got my discharge. There is no place I should rather spend the rest of my life in, if my free inclination were omnipotent: but I should have to make myself younger, less sensitive to chill and damp, less disinclined to travel (because I shouldn’t like to give up my other haunts, Avila, Rome, Paris) and able to find a place, simple but comfortable enough, in which I could work without interruption. When I was in England last year I was not well and not comfortable. Possibly it was for this reason that I felt that everything was somewhat changed, materially and morally: less peace, less deference, less facility in obtaining services or small comforts. It was very like America. If I lived in England now I fear I should feel that sort of pressure which drove me away from America—that same difficulty in escaping and being at peace. The resource of living quite in the country is not open to me, unless I took a house and servants, which of itself would be perdition. . . .

Here there are so many English people that when I go to tea in “The English Tearooms”, I might almost be at the “George”. I peeped in there when I was last at Oxford, but found it so disgustingly changed that I immediately went out again. Cortina is a good place for the pedestrian, I don’t mean only for the Alpine adventurer, but for the peripatetic philosopher; clouds and frequent rain keep the summer cool—almost too cool; and the noisy Italians in the hotel do not seriously disturb me in my own corner. Besides, I like Italians.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Volksdorf, Germany. August 14, 1905

Your last letter has given me much to ruminate over—at first I couldn’t understand all your points but I think that I do now. When you say that “extensity” is not extension, and that it belongs to sensation and not to the object felt, I recognise a Jamesianism; but it seems to me that if we distinguish the fact of feeling from the content of it, the former being a psychic event and the latter a material element, “extensity” is altogether absent from the first; a landscape has extensity, but my seeing the landscape has none. The difference between a landscape and infinite geometrical space, I understand; the latter being constructed; but the extensity of something which is a psychic fact and not the object represented or discovered there, is beyond me. Are you not running about in a circle trying to escape from natural things and forced nevertheless to find behind your back what you are removing from before your eyes? Of course I use “mind” for what is distinguishably psychic, non-extended, imponderable, neither north, east, south, or west of any other mental fact. But the extensity of James’s bellyache is decidedly under his waistcoat, and is in truth nothing at all but the projection of one vague physical object, in which pain is felt, into the region covered by another physical object, better defined, in which pride, perhaps, is taken. But to say that the pain, apart from the idea or object called the belly, is extended seems to me as capricious and silly as to say that the pride I take in my waistcoat is an extended, rounded, and many-buttoned pride. I agree with you that sensation and emotion are the subject-matter of psychology, quite as much as reflection or thought; but sensation, to be distinguished from what is felt, has to lose its material properties and cease to be extended, coloured, heavy, measurable, lockable in chests, or preservable through time. In a word the occasions of knowledge are mental but the objects of knowledge are not.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To José Sastre González
Via S. Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. August 13, 1943

Today, on the day of the second bombing of Rome, I have received your letter of July 25. I understand why you think about “the difficult moments” that I must have had here, but I have nothing new to report and am calm, without changing in any way my daily routine. You must realize that I live in a convent which is at the same time a hospital. Everything is in order, and if any misfortune should strike this house, help could not be closer. This area of the city is neither downtown nor full of industry; it is made up in large part of gardens to the south of the Colosseum and the Lateran. If a bomb should fall here it would be by chance and I do believe that we will come out of the war unharmed.

Naturally the mind suffers when it hears talk of so many horrors, but at my age, knowing that I am useless, I find solace in my books and my philosophy, as though it were a matter of ancient history. Besides, everything that is happening in the world is out of the ordinary. I often remember my father’s ideas and imagine what he would have said about all of this.

You mustn’t think about trips. That would upset me much more than the noise of the bombs, or of the anti-aircraft artillery, which is the one that hurts the ears most.

As far as health goes, I am well and I have hopes of living long enough to see how this tragedy ends. For you and the whole family a strong embrace from your uncle.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Sra. Eduardo Sastre Martin, Madrid, Spain

To George Jean Nathan
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London
Paris. August 12, 1923

The title “The Smart Set” suggests a world where I don’t belong: but if you will send me a number, and if I have any thing on hand that would seem suitable to such a superior environment, I should be glad to let you have it.

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Cornell University Library, Cornell NY

To Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London
Oxford, England. [Dated by G.S.: June 13, 1915]

Dear Kallen,

Your address on Nationality, for which I am much obliged, seems to put its finger on the right spot. Nationality seems to be behind the restlessness, ambition, and obduracy that brought the war about, behind the endurance and zeal of the combatants, and also before their eyes (in every camp) in so far as they see anything at all before them to aim at. But in a popular address you naturally couldn’t broach the questions that arise in the analytic mind on such a subject. If ninetenths of a man’s individuality are his nationality, nationality must cover a good deal that is common to all men, and much that is common to very few. And I hardly see how nationality, in this moral and inward sense, is to find political expression.

Such national movements as the Italian, Balkan, or Irish are movements to establish what you call nationhood; so is Zionism, I suppose. Yet you hardly look to seeing the various nationalities in the U.S. establish special governments; I am not sure (I am so ignorant) whether the Pale is a district so preponderantly Jewish that a Jewish local government could be hoped for there. In these cases Nationality would have to be a voluntary and hazy thing: the degree to which anyone possessed it, the intensity and scope of his nationalism would be impossible to fix. And surely there is an American nationality as definite and potent as any other, and on the same plane as the Irish, German, Jewish, etc. Every hyphenated American will therefore have two nationalities: and I don’t understand exactly what you think should be the relation between them. In other words, aren’t you hesitating between the idea of a universal government with all nationalities free under it, and the idea of one nationality one government? It is the difficulty of realizing either of these ideals that seems to me to make nationality a problem rather than a solution.

There is no change in my life since I last described it to you.

Yours sincerely, G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, New York NY