Author: David Spiech Page 17 of 283

To John McKinstry Merriam
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome, November 15, 1945

My dear Merriam:

Senex ad senem de senectute scribo: yet we are much older than Cicero ever was and also much more recent, so that we have a double chance of being wiser, having more experience of life, individual and collective. And the charm I find in old age—for I was never happier than I am Now—comes of having learned to live in the moment, and thereby in eternity; and this means recovering a perpetual youth, since nothing can be fresher than each day as it dawns and changes. When we have no expectations, the actual is a continual free gift, but much more placidly accepted than it could be when we were children; for then the stage was full of trap doors and unimaginable transformations that kept us always alarmed, eager, and on the point of tears; whereas now we have wept our tears out, we know what can pop up of those trap doors, and what kind of shows those transformations can present; and we remember many of them with affection, and watch the new ones that still come with interest and good will, but without false claims for our own future.

So much for the philosophy of old age. As for current events, state of health or decrepitude, etc., I have little to say. I seem to be perfectly well, but like the One Horse Shay I am undoubtedly a little feeble all over, and less than an atomic bomb, if it struck me, would probably reduce me to a little heap of dust. Meantime I continue to write more or less every day, and have weathered the little discomforts of war and muddled peace without serious trouble. The Sisters here look after me nicely, I have a pleasant corner room with extensive views over green country and mean to remain here for the rest of my days. As to society, I have never received so many visits as the American soldiers in Rome have made me. It has been very pleasant to see so many young faces and to autograph so many books, which is what they usually ask me to do. As to memories of 1886, I have written them out, and need not repeat them, but wish the survivors a happy and peaceful sunset.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: American Antiquarian Society, Worcester MA.

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Hotel Danieli
Venice, Italy. November 14, 1939

As to Florence and Papini, they are not in my line.  You don’t know very much about me*. I avoid literary people and Anglo-American centres, like Florence; and I am not “America’s” this or that. I have never been an American citizen, but still travel with a Spanish passport, though I seldom go to Spain, my relations there being all dead as are my best friends in England. Yet I still love them all; and now that my Realms of Being are finished at last, I am turning to writing recollections about them.

Yours sincerely G Santayana

* But you are right in feeling that I sympathize with Peacock’s point of view. Yet I didn’t like the one book of his that I have read, except the Latin in it. Witty at times, but fault-finding & inconclusive.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.

To Lawrence Smith Butler
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London.
Oxford, England. November 13, 1915

Dear Lawrence,

Mrs Potter writes me that you have lost your mother, and I know what a great sorrow that must be for you. For almost anybody the death of a mother cuts deeper than any other bereavement, it strikes more at the roots of one’s life and seems to require a new beginning and almost a new character in oneself. One becomes a senior, a person of the older generation, whose past is buried out of sight of the world, and has become strange and mysterious to other people, and almost to oneself. But in your case there must be something more, because you all lived in such complete sympathy, like contemporaries, and all kept young together. Your mother was one of the most perfect and ideal mothers I have ever seen, absorbed in her children and living their lives without sentimentality and without interfering with their liberty. She deserved what she obtained, which is so rare, that you all remained about her after you were grown up, not from necessity, but by instinct and through affection. I am sure you must have made her as happy as she made you.

. . . Now perhaps you will get married at last, as we have all expected you to do these many years. No doubt for the present you are not thinking of that. If you feel lost and troubled by the foolish noise and flurry that you probably see about you, in that extraordinarily loud New York, it occurs to me that you might find something to do that would at once be worthy of your sorrow and help you to forget it if you came to France and did some work for the wounded. Mr Harjes (of Morgan Harjes) has an American ambulance in which some of my young friends have been employed; and if you had your own motor perhaps you might join some purely French ambulance corps, if you preferred that. I believe my friend Pierre Abreu has done so. Those who have helped in France all seem to be very much deepened and steadied by it, as are the French themselves by this war. I am not one of those who say that anything so fearful is good for people, better than what they might have seen and felt in times of peace: but it certainly contains compensations for all the hardening and suffering which it brings—that people live in the presence of the terrible realities of this world, instead of nursing their comfortable illusions.

The war has made me very unhappy, and incidentally has upset all my plans. I have found nice lodgings in Oxford (where I have always liked to live) and am waiting for the storm to blow over. I may go to America for two months next year, if the war lasts; but I am longing, when peace returns, to go back to Paris, Spain, and Italy. Now the journey is troublesome, and I don’t want to be nearer the horrors of war (since I am useless) than I can help. Here we feel much bitterness and disappointment at the course things are taking, but the young people are splendid, and material life goes on much as usual.—How nice it would be if you should come here for a few days! You probably have no idea of how much affection—at least for me!—I have always felt for you, and what an unmixed pleasure it is to remember you, as I do very often.

Yours affectionately

G Santayana

P.S. Excuse this scrawl in pencil. I am writing at a country inn, one of those to which I now walk out to lunch whenever the weather is fair—to lunch on bread and cheese and a glass of beer, which is all these places afford. But the skies and fields are very beautiful, and I like the solitude.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The University Club, New York NY.

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Bristol, Rome,
Rome. November 12, 1931.

The Bushes (of Columbia) have been here; also “Elizabeth” of the German Garden. The latter told me some interesting things about her late husband, my old friend Lord Russell. In the first place we both agreed that it was most satisfactory—much more so than anyone could have hoped—that he should have been rehabilitated and rewarded at the end with a place in the government: you know, I suppose, that he was successively under secretary for Transport and for India in the late Labour government. But he and “Elizabeth” had had the most bitter quarrels and had long been separated. She says marriage is a horrid thing, and that nobody ought to be bound to anybody else. Have you read her last book, Father? It is another picture of the evils of domestic tyranny, although in this case neither of the two domestic tyrants pillaried is a husband. She has built herself a house, with a garden in which things at last are able to grow, on the hills behind Cannes: and one of her husband’s relations was coming to stay with her, and was being greeted with waving scarves and eager smiles at the garden gate, when the visitor’s long face and solemn air made the hostess ask what was the matter.

“Frank!” cried the new comer, with tragic brevity.
“What about him now?”
“Dead and cremated!”

And this was the way in which “Elizabeth” received the glad tidings that she was once more a widow. She says she was never happier in her life. She also told me that Bertie had presented himself at the House of Lords to take his seat, but had been rudely shown to the door: a brother must wait eleven months for the succession, in case his bereaved sister-in-law should have a posthumous male child. This law, with modern manners and morals, opens vistas of curious possible plots: I shouldn’t wonder if “Elizabeth” took advantage of one of them.

All this merriment may seem heartless at the death of a husband and an old friend: but “Elizabeth” and I are known to be heartless: at least, for my own part, I feel so much the continual death of everything and everybody, and have so learned to reconcile myself to it, that the final and official end loses must of its impressiveness. I have now lost almost everybody that has counted for much in my life.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hôtel de Milan,
Rome. November 11, 1912

I am quite absorbed in the “New Realism”—dreadful as the style of it all is—and as soon as I have finished it, in two or three days, I will send it on to you, as you say you have no copy at hand. I am glad you liked Benda’s book. When I began it, I thought he might be some excentric carping incompetent person; but on reading on, and especially on rereading, I saw how far that was from being the case.—I have changed one or two complimentary epithets, in my article (about Bergson’s style) into epithets of a sour-sweet quality, in deference to Benda’s criticism of the same, which opened my eyes. Russell’s article on Bergson I have not seen. The new realists, by the way, are very hostile to Bergson, too, which surprises me a little. If his theory of perception is like theirs, they detest his metaphysics. And, if it were not for kindly illusions and pious feelings, they would have to attack James as well. They do attack Dewey, for believing too much in the separately psychical. And poor Royce’s lordly sophistry is trailed in the dust. Schiller they ignore, you and me are also covered under a merciful silence, while Münsterberg schwebt over the whole scene like a huge grinning bat—the hideous and bloated Angel of Darkness.

Americans are beginning to turn up in large numbers, and I have come across several friends and acquaintances of late. Yours ever G.S.

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.