Author: David Spiech Page 209 of 283

To Rosamond Thomas [Sturgis] Little
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. June 10, 1950

At last I put pen to paper to answer your various kind letters. I have been well enough to write, except for two or three days in midwinter when I was snatched from the abyss by penicillin; but instead of being busy with a new life like you, I have been driven by the fixed idea of getting my big final book, Dominations and Powers into shape. The last part, all but the last chapter, is now being typed by the tireless Miss Evelyn Tindall, secretary to the British Minister to the Holy See, who has copied all my books since, and including, The Last Puritan. She has white ringlets and youthful flesh-coloured stockings, and produces the most beautiful faultless pages to the eye; but there are little matters wrong here and there so that everything has to be reread as if it was printer’s copy.

This, however, I shall not have to do, as Scribner’s assistants are very good at standard proof-reading. It is only some philosophical terms that sometimes floor them. I am now doing this proof-reading on Part II, which Cory will read afterwards, and we hope to get these parts–the first is already in Scribner’s hands–to New York in the Autumn. This is an immense relief.

. . . . P.S. I liked the idea of “Atoms of Thought”; but the Execution has given me a shock. It reads like an anti-religious tract of the Rationalist Society: and Cardiff has the impudence to compare me to Thomas Paine, and not to Thomas Aquinas!

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

To Mary Potter Bush
9 Ave de l’Observatoire
Paris. June 9, 1914

Your note touches me deeply. I had no idea that you had been so ill, much less that you could take more than the most casual interest in what concerns me. There is no reason why we shouldn’t often meet again, in New York or here. As to happiness I find that it is of two kinds, one the kind we dream of when we are young and vague in our desires, and the other the kind we find possible and suitable to our capacities when we begin to be old and wise. I venture to say that I have attained this second kind of happiness more nearly than most people, and I shouldn’t now exchange it for the other more ideal sort even if it were possible. The secret of it, in my case, lies in the very old but forgotten maxim of not possessing things nor being possessed by them, more than is absolutely inevitable. On that principle, I have made my peace with things, and find my life very acceptable.

Thank you very much for writing as you do and still more for not thinking my resigned philosophy and my selfish existence a blot on the landscape, as I sometimes suspect that most people do. Is it because they see more than we can see, or because they shut their eyes to everything?

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

To Andrew Joseph Onderdonk
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. June 8, 1945

Dear Onderdonk:

You know how weak old men’s memories become for current events. I can remember or rather reconstruct old scenes most vividly; but what happened last week or last month is lost in the fog. For this reason I can hardly remember whether a second parcel from you, containing only tea, has reached me or not. Such a parcel, once or twice, has actually come; but some have arrived anonymously, so that, if I didn’t write to thank you, it either didn’t get to me at all, or did so without your name. In any case, let me thank you now for your kind intention. But don’t send anything more. The family have now begun to attend to my little wants regularly.

. . . . I am glad you refrained from sending me the review in Camby’s paper about the second volume of Persons & Places, [entitled “The Middle Span” without my knowledge or consent for commercial reasons: but it is an integral part of the whole book, and will ultimately, I hope, appear, with volume third, in an edition with illustrations, marginal comments (omitted, I suppose, for economy) and the suppressed passages: but I shall not see that edition, so that I can indulge in the illusion that it will be magnificent.]

Such selected reviews of vol. II as I have seen have shown more tolerance than I had expected, especially in this time of political ardour and glory. The most appreciative is by Christopher Morley: he understands my spirit perfectly; only my philosophy is ignored, which is better than if it were misrepresented.–By the way, I am not in the least “Beyond Good and Evil”, you meant perhaps beyond praise and blame: and even that is not true when the praise or blame are intelligent. Certainly mere anger doesn’t affect me. Anger always has a cause, and in that sense may be important; but it never has a reason, and therefore should be disregarded in correcting one’s own sentiments.

My next book, on “The Idea of Christ” will surprise people by being entirely different, and will make a different set of people angry. But it will please the High Church party, when they are not really believers.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Boylston Adams Beal
9 Av de l’Observatoire
Paris. June 7, 1920

Your letter was awaiting me here, where I have just returned from Italy, and where I expect to spend the summer. It makes me feel, in one way, how much I am cut off from what used to be our common circle; you tell me things, and imply others, that I had no notion of. That I mentioned Herbert in writing to you was a pure accident as I had heard nothing of his breaking down or disappearing from the world—I suppose at Pawtucket or whatever the name of the place is where his wife’s family spent the summer—nor did I know that Elsie’s mother was dead. I am very sorry to hear it; especially about Herbert, since that is the less inevitable misfortune. I have always felt that he was a sacrifice offered on the altar of Bostonian superstition about work—a sort of Isaac that Abraham was ordered to slay, and no opportune angel or sheep came in at the last moment to save him. If he had had a little more courage, he might have become one of those disaffected and homeless Americans of whom I see so much in these parts: and perhaps that, too, would not have been satisfactory. What a curious tragedy Puritanism is!

When you come to Europe again I hope you will not stay in England, as I hardly expect to return there for a year or more; when it gets too cold here (we can get no coal and very little wood) I shall probably go to Spain (where I haven’t been since before the war) or to Italy, where I had a very pleasant and not wholly idle winter this year. The routine of life for me is everywhere much the same, but I like to drink in congenial sights and sounds, and to haunt congenial places; and Rome is a most congenial place to me in every way.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Hotel Bristol
Rome. June 6th 1939

In itself a return to Virginia has always seemed to me the natural and consoling thing for you to do, and I have wondered why you didn’t do it sooner, or gave it up so quickly when you actually tried it. Perhaps it is that you don’t need what I call “consoling”, but as George says, are so young in spirit and so full of life that you want a field for give and take and for moral excitement. That your relations in Virginia won’t talk about the things that are now uppermost in your mind, would seem to me restful. You could discuss them so much more pleasantly with yourself. And unless they are aggressive people and talk too much (which I don’t think probable) they will form part of the picture, like the river and the ships. At least that is what I like now for an environment, and am giving up going to Cortina this summer because of “Settembrini” with whom I should have to have long conversations (and in Italian!) every day for six weeks. If you have read Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain you know what “Settembrini” is; my friend has that character and those opinions, and though he says he lives on my philosophy, I am wearied by the reflection of it in that fierce mirror. I don’t like mental fierceness, even on my own side in philosophy, and this “Settembrini”, in order to make it fierce, has to leave out at least one half of it. Strong and Cory, who are together at Vevey on the Lake of Geneva, think I ought to go there, so as not to be caught in Italy in case of war. I don’t think there will be a war this year, but the mere talk about it is disturbing, and I want to be as quiet as possible, to write the last chapter of the Realm of Spirit, and other things that have turned up incidentally. . . . Solitude is my defence. It may be selfish, but it makes me kinder, because it enables me to think of people as they are in themselves and not as they affect me, or judge me.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA