Author: David Spiech Page 200 of 283

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hôtel des Réservoirs
Versailles, France. July 27, 1932

You have no idea with what reluctance I tore myself from my Roman diggings and undertook what now seems a great and troublesome adventure: for I don’t know if I have told you that I am to go to England as well as Holland, and to read a paper on Locke before the (Bloomsbury) Royal Society of Literature. It is not only my elderly self that is changed: the good train from Rome to Paris has been taken off; the rapide that remains is as quick or quicker, being now largely electric, but the carriages are inferior, the dining-car occasional only, and altogether there is a feeling everywhere that the good old capitalistic days are over, and that the world is going native, that is, common. However, my trip so far has been easy and simple enough. Poor Strong had gone to stay with his daughter, who has just returned from America, for the summer, to her house at Saint Germain: but after a week he found the arrangement impossible and went home to Fiesole. When I arrived in Paris, he was gone. It had more than once occurred to me, in previous years, that Versailles would be a good place to live and work in Summer: and here was I with a free field, two lectures to prepare, and two months to spend somewhere before going to The Hague. So I looked up rooms in the swagger Trianon Palace Hotel: not very attractive; too “first class” for a person who feels old, shabby, and ugly. So I took rooms at this Hôtel des Réservoirs, which matches such a battered personage perfectly. It was once an excellent hotel, and retains a certain air of faded gentility: reminds you of the Paris Opera House and the ballets of the Second Empire. I have been alone, or almost alone, in the place, but for the Sunday trippers and an occasional old-fashioned party for lunch; but I am comfortable, have done good work, and am training by walking vigorously in the magnificent park, to which this hotel has a private gate.

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 Constable and Co. Ltd.
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, S.W.1
Cortina, Italy. July 26, 1924

Dear Sirs,

Whenever anyone asks for permission to quote from any of my books, you may assume that you have my consent. It is for you to decide whether the quotation amounts to an infringement of copyright: although I should think, in most cases, citation of extracts would be a valuable advertisement, and that it would be in your interest to agree to it; unless, indeed, you find that the more an author is quoted, the less anyone will wish to buy his books.

Yours faithfully,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Temple University Libraries, Philadelphia PA

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Miramonti
Cotina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 25, 1934

It is reassuring to hear that you are not contemplating any rash commitments in the way of marriage and supporting a family. If you find a sympathetic lady, who is independent, I see no obstacles to a union: it is not being married but being responsible for a family, and tied to it, that might be a drag on your philosophy.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Palazzo della Fonte
Fiuggi, Italy. July 24, 1941

Dear Clemens:

I have two cards of yours with complimentary suggestions. I am sensible of the compliments, but I think the suggestions had better not be carried out, at least not at present.

First, you propose a book to mark my 78th birthday.1 I am sure nobody wants to contribute to such a book and nobody wants to read it. Why should you employ your undoubted abilities in order to get the unwilling to write and the unwilling to buy, if not to read? Put it off at least until my death or until my 80th birthday, when perhaps the air will be purer.

Secondly, you propose to dedicate your “new book” to me. I don’t know what book this is to be, and whether it at all requires or suggests such a dedication. Wouldn’t it be better at present to let me remain in the background?

You know, I suppose, that I am not an American citizen, but have always retained my Spanish Nationality. There is therefore no reason why I should be driven from Italy, except that my money has been stopped or “frozen”. If I can get it more easily in Switzerland or Spain, I may have to go soon to one or the other country. Until October I am all right here.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

1. The Winter-Spring 1942 (vol. V, no. 1) issue of The Mark Twain Quarterly marked Santayana’s seventy-eighth birthday. This issue features a saying composed by Santayana for the Mark Twain Society’s Greeting Book: “One of the best fruits of reason is to perceive how irrational we are: laughter and humility can then go together”.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Savoia,
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 23, 1938

Dear Cory,

This week my routine, but not my work, has been pleasantly interrupted by a visit from a very old friend, Herbert Lyman, who was in my class at Harvard, with whom I lived for six weeks at Dresden in 1886, and who was always a kindly soul, although long lost in the bog of business. He seemed wizened and dry, physically and morally, and I could glean little from him about affairs in America, except that he thoroughly disapproved of Roosevelt. But we took pleasant walks, I talked a lot, and he had the good sense to go away on the third day, according to the Scriptures, when our fund of reminiscences began to give out. He also had the good sense not to bring his wife and daughter with whom he is travelling, but hastened to rejoin them at Salzburg, for an orgy of music and Germanism.

When S. suggested that you were wasting time seeing the sights, you might have asked if it was not better to perceive than to talk about perception. Or you might have reminded him of the many idle hours he used to spend in front of cafés drinking—one black coffee, and watching the passing—traffic^x

Yours affly,

G.S.

x Afterthought:
You don’t drink what there is to drink,
You don’t see what there is to see.
With nothing about which to think
What can the use of thinking be?

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY