Author: David Spiech Page 13 of 283

To Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 14, 1949

Dear Mr Lipinski

I shall be very glad to sit for you any afternoon for the sketch that you wish to make of me. I have not sat for anyone since 1896, when Andreas Andersen did a charcoal drawing of me by the firelight in my room in Staughton Hall at Harvard, which to me seems the only real portrait that was ever taken of me.

I do not usually see the Atlantic Monthly, and should be glad, not that it is necessary as an introduction, to see a photograph of anything that you have drawn.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript:Collection of Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Address: C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
Polstreath,Megairssey,
Cornwall, England.  Jan. 13, 1917

I wish I could talk with you about the war and the glimmerings of peace: apart from Boylston Beal . . . I am still pursued by the fatality of having only radical or pro-German friends, and it tries my patience sorely. Why will clever people be so frivolous, captious, and pert-minded? Hooker said “nothing is so malapert as a splenetic religion”, but nothing makes me so splenetic as a malapert judgment in politics. After all, religion is congenitally the sphere of fancy and passion: but people ought to be serious in their views of this world. Don’t you think the Allies have made most happy replies to the German and the American notes?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St. Oxford
Oxford, England. January 12, 1919

Dear Strong

It is quite true that in my comments on your book I haven’t come to close quarters with your arguments. I think your metaphysical system, as sketched in your last chapter, is very attractive, and that if I could grasp it, I should have no difficulty in embracing it as at least one of the possible accounts of substance, or perhaps as a part of the true account of it, for I suppose if “attentive vividness” were widely diffused in matter, your axiom that it could not arise by evolution would be less plausible. But the difficulty I find is not in believing but in conceiving your position, and I hark back to other conceptions because I can’t frame those you propose. You see that I can’t comprehend “attentive vividness”, nor “feeling”, nor “introspection”, and I am not sure that “sensation” is intelligible to me, because while you say it ought to be distinguished from the object (the sensibile?) you also say that you can see a sensation move. This drives me to distraction, and my only resource is to unknit my brow and try to see the thing for myself in my own terms. Sometimes I think I have caught your meaning: e.g. I flattered myself that “attentive vividness” was simply a new name for awareness, and therefore I went on to say that it must be intuition of an essence, since awareness of nothing would not be awareness, I suppose. But now you tell me this is wrong, that “attentive vividness” is an entirely different thing, and I confess I am simply lost again. I have reread your last chapter and carefully studied your letter, but I don’t feel able to make any pertinent comments at present, because I am too much in doubt about your meaning.

My brother in Boston has lost his wife, who was the youngest (except my youthful self) of our generation. Their boy is still in France, and writes very interesting accounts of his experiences as a soldier. My brother is naturally much affected and writes despondently about his own approaching end: but I believe there is no ground for this foreboding, Yours ever

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
Anglo–American Nile Steamer & Hotel Company,
Chief Office, Sharia Boulac, Cairo,
(Grand Continental Hotel Buildings)
Luxor, Egypt. 11 January [1905]

January 11th 1904
near Luxor on the Nile

Dear Fuller,

. . . I am at this moment going up the Nile with an impossible party of tourists, conscious of being no less grotesque myself than the rest of them. So many labour-saving-machines have left us no time for anything, else I should like to travel long in the East and yield for a time to its fascinations. People here seem to realise something of Faust’s dream, to be young in body and old in spirit. What an amusing place the world would be to such a creature. We sometimes speak of regretting lost illusions. What a silly idea! We may well regret lost powers, but the loss of illusions is an unmixed benefit. It leaves you free face to face with the facts and authorizes you to profit by every real opportunity. The trouble is that, the Life of Reason being so largely in abeyance, people do not ordinarily lose their illusions till they have lost their passions, and then the real world, when they see it for the first time as it is, seems to them stale, not because it is real but because they are played out.

I may perhaps go to Jerusalem and Damascus before returning to Europe. The donkey is losing its terrors for me and I now generally ride at the head of the party. Think what a party it must be!

Yours G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Bruno Lind (Robert C. Hahnel)
Via S. Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 10, 1952

Dear Lind

The enclosed letter has just arrived, and makes me wonder at the complexity of life now in the U.S. It was much simpler in my early days. It occurred to me at once when you first wrote, including a typed letter for me to sign, to the Photographic Department in the Library of Congress, how easily I could have sent you a copy of that sonnet–only 14 lines!–which I have a copy of, and besides know by heart. It is not a good sonnet considered as a work of classic poetic art, but it has many tentacles stretching into feelings, backward from 1895, when it was written, and foreward also. For you will notice that the line “Why mourn for Jesus?–Christ remains to us” accurately prophesies my “Idea of Christ in the Gospels” published more than fifty years later. 1895 had been the year of my first visit to Italy, in company with my friend Loeser, and it was on my return from there that I stopped at Arles, and other places in Southeastern France, before returning to America in a cattle-boat, for economy, from London to N.Y. in 16 days, without a touch of seasickness. I am not sure whether I speak of this voyage in any detail, or of the journey to Florence, Rome, Venice, and Milan, but they were all sentimentally important episodes for me at that time, when I was beginning to live my second, or rather my third life after my “Change of Heart” in 1893, described in the first chapter of the third book of “Persons & Places.” This was a reversion to solitude enriched by a great many absorbing scenes in the past and absorbing themes in the present and for the future. The sonnet in question has not been printed expressly because I think it would not be understood as yet; but it will appear in my “Posthumous Poems,” which Cory will publish; and it occurs to me to say all this to you now, since you happen to have searched it out at the Congressional Library, to which I sent it (when asked for something) together with the portrait by Andreas Andersen, made one year later, when my College Life at the Harvard Yard was coming to an end. The next year 1896–7 I was at King’s College; and when I returned to Harvard I lived in rooms in the town, like any outsider. All these things and others are pertinent, beginning with the Platonic Sonnets, to the various implications of that Sonnet at Arles. I give you these hints, knowing that you are penetrating, and wishing that your penetration may go right. When do you expect to have your book done, soon or years hence? I should like to be able to read it before it is published.

Yours sincerely  G Santayana

P.S. Feb. 25, ’52

I had just sent off my letter about your sonnets on the Via Crucis, when this was returned to me–my second blunder in addressing letters to you. I send it again, hoping that this time it will reach you, as by chance it touches the same points as my last.

G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.