Author: David Spiech Page 224 of 283

To Mary Potter Bush
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome, March 21, 1945

I have been, as you doubtless, know, reviewing the past not so much sentimentally as egotistically, for my retrospective pleasure: much purer than was the pleasure of living through the actual events.

. . . . This war disturbed me much less than the other: this was not a competition between rivals for the same things, but a shock between people with different objects in view. And the end seems to promise a more enlightened reconstruction than followed upon the other war.

. . . . I hope that, like me, you are finding the evening of life the pleasantest part of it.

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 Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome, March 20, 1946

[T]hey don’t seem to me to see the real difficulty in establishing a universal peace. It is not a question of votes or meetings or public opinion, but of the force that will impose any decisions that may be agreed upon verbally.

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 Mary Williams Winslow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall
London, S.W.
Nice, France. March 19, 1923

I have been reading a new book of Freud’s and other things by his disciples. They are settling down to a steadier pace, and reducing their paradoxes to very much what everybody has always known.

Einstein I do not attempt to read: I am willing to have a maximum of “relativity”; but I wonder if they have ever considered that if “relative” systems have no connexion and no common object, each is absolute; and if they have a common object, or form a connected group of perspectives, then they are only relative views, like optical illusions, and the universe is not ambiguous in its true form.

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

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. March 18, 1932

A young Spaniard who is at the Spanish Academy here came to lunch yesterday. He is a surréaliste and thinks the reaction of the mind, the splash, everything, and the material impression nothing, so that the ideal would be blank pages for poetry and paintings admired in the dark.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 17, 1927

I want to send off vol. I. of the Big Book, “The Realm of Essence,” which I have almost completely rewritten but to which I wish to add an appendix — concerning three contemporary equivalents for my theory which have lately come to light: viz. Guénon’s version of the Hindu Brahman, Whitehead’s chapter on “Abstraction” in his “Science in the Modern World”, and Husserl’s “Phaenomenologie”. The latter (which I am just beginning to study) is wonderfully coincident with my notions, although approached from the psychological side…. I think a short notice of these three writers, with some quotations, will very much conciliate the readers—at least the professorial readers—of my “Realm of Essence” and make them see that it is no hobby or madness of mine, but an obvious Columbus’ egg which their worships had never thought of erecting on its own bottom.

. . . . I am reading Congreve for the first time: he is less licentious than I expected, and infinitely more witty. I laugh aloud like a madman at many of his sallies. And his English is admirable—a great treat and lesson for me after most of what I am condemned to read—beginning with the new “Morning Post”.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY