Author: David Spiech Page 230 of 283

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel “La Peninsular”
Seville, Spain. Feb. 19, 1914.

I live day and night with open windows and blinds half drawn–to keep out the excessive sunlight, and the violets and crocuses are already in bloom, and everything promises a Spring of an overpowering intensity.

When it rains here, too, it is in a torrential fashion, as if Zeus were really venting his wrath.

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 George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Feb. 18th, 1935

One effect of old age is that days and weeks seem to pass more quickly: there is hardly time to do anything, and evening and Sunday come round when you thought it was Wednesday or the early afternoon. I suppose the tempo of one’s own blood-vessels, or whatever keeps time within us, has grown slower, and we glide over events as if they were nothing capable of leaving a mark because our brains are too soft to retain new impressions. It’s not at all an unpleasant condition, though a bit ignominious, like all decay. A Mr. Keene, 79 years old, came to see me yesterday and told stories by rote. He said he enjoyed his visit, and I believe him. But he knows that I won’t return it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Henry Ward Abbot
Berlin. Feb. 17th 1887

The psychology of your dogmatic pessimism … that says we ought not to live, is not hard to explain. Given a man full of naïve desires; let him be so favorably situated that his naive desires are for the most part satisfied, and he begins a search for refined and unmixed pleasures. He thereupon becomes blasé, and sings with Solomon, when not overpowered by the demands of his eight or nine hundred concubines, that all is vanity. If, unlike Solomon, he is not also a wise man, he will reason with himself thus. “I wanted pleasures, continuous and unmixed—that is the only object I had in life, ergo, the only object which anyone not a damned fool can have. This object is unattainable. There is then no object to make life worth living: ergo, no one ought to live.” This last of course is on the supposition that we oughtn’t to do what isn’t worth doing—an undeniable maxim when it is question of a means to an end, but an impossible one when it is question of ultimate ends. For if our ultimate end must be worth choosing, we must have a further standard by which we can measure its worth, that is, it must not be ultimate. Ultimate objects are facts needing no justification: if you try to justify them you are in the position of the Indian who made the earth rest on the elephant, or of the European who made it hang on God. The latter had the disadvantage, by the way, of not knowing about the tortoise. The confusion in all these cases arises from the attempt to apply to the whole what by its nature applies only to the part—rationality, worth, damned foolishness, weight, and causality, being all relations between parts, which the whole cannot have simply because it is not a part of something bigger, nor an object, a means to any ulterior object.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. Feb. 16, 1947

We have been having a severe winter with cold rain and little sun since Christmas; but I have kept very well. It is only my work that has suffered because without the sun I felt more like lounging in my chaise longue, well wrapped up, and reading, than like sitting up to write. But there is no hurry about my political book which must last me until my wits give out, as this is the last number in my programme. However, if the lights don’t go out when it is finished, I have an impromptu ready for the audience, who being only future readers, can’t run away visibly. It is a set of afternoon lectures for imaginary ladies on The False Steps of Philosophy: would be better in French: Les Faux Pas de la Philosophie. She began her deviations from the straight path very early, with Socrates, whom I should show not to have been such a sound moralist as he is reputed to be, and really a rogue. After him, I should expose (pleasantly of course) the errors of Saint Paul, in preaching total depravity (while dear Saint John was preaching universal love) and making Christ the Scapegoat instead of the Lamb. Then I should skip to Descartes who misled the whole chorus of modern philosophers, except Spinoza, by making them fall in love with themselves. But all this is a waste of time, because I shall never get to it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Henry Ward Abbot
7 Stoughton
Cambridge, Massachusetts. 15 February 1892 [postmark]
Sunday

I am very much pleased with what people have said of my verses lately, and I am making up my mind to try and publish more, finally following your advice of long ago. The reason is that having deteriorated and become worldly I want the world to think me a poet and philosopher; while I really had the temper of one I despised the world as it deserves. I also should like to have a reputation and a resource to back me in my academic life, which is resolutely unconventional, and which people may not always put up with. But I will never be a professor unless I can be one, as it were, per accidens. I would rather beg than be one essentially.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY