Author: David Spiech Page 245 of 283

To Logan Pearsall Smith
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. Dec. 2. 1921

Being lazy myself, I rather sympathize with our new masters, the proletariat, but I am sometimes afraid that they will be beguiled, will not really accept the simpler life which their ideal would impose on them, as well as on the rest of us, and will simply succumb to their old masters, or to new ones no less ungentle, after having made all this row for nothing.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC

To Lawrence Smith Butler
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. Dec. 1. 1944

… Much as I should like to see you, I shouldn’t advise you to come to Italy until you hear that things have returned somewhat to the normal. In Rome, as you know, there has been little damage done to buildings: but the country has been thoroughly pillaged by the two friendly foreign armies that have passed over it; communications and victualling are difficult; and people have no work and no means of carrying on their trades. Food is scarce and bad, and the value of money and the price of everything are uncertain. We also lack coal, and electric light shines decently only every third day. Life would therefore not be comfortable or easy for a traveller. I myself have been lucky in being taken in by these Sisters. They have a nicely furnished house and nice English ideas of food and comfort, and we manage very well, in spite of all difficulties. Of late, too, I have received various presents, as well as many visits, from American army men, and am revelling in the lost luxuries of tea, marmalade, cheese, anchovies, shaving-cream, and even peanuts. I have been photographed and interviewed to exhaustion; but I am happy like a sky without clouds, and still at work with the pen. In the second volume of Persons & Places, you are commemorated among “Americans in Europe.” I hope you won’t be angry at the past tense: but I write of everything as if it were ancient history.¹ Motto: Veritas.²
Yours affly,
G Santayana

1. See Persons and Places, 379.80.
2. Truth (Latin). This is also the motto of Harvard University.

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

To Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall
I Tatti
Florence, Italy. Nov. 30, 1912

You have not heard, perhaps, that my mother died soon after I left America. It was not an unexpected loss, and in one sense, as you know, it had really occurred long before, as my mother had not been herself for some years. Nevertheless, her death makes a tremendous difference in all our lives, as she had always been the ruling influence over us. She had a very strong will and a most steadfast character, and her mere presence, even in the decline of her faculties, was the central fact and bond of union for us. Now, everything seems to be dissolved.
. . . .
I was forgetting to tell you what is perhaps the only important fact—that I have resigned my professorship altogether, and don’t expect to go back to America at any fixed time. As you know, my situation at Harvard has never been to my liking altogether, and latterly much less so, because I began to be tired of teaching and too old for the society of young people, which is the only sort I found tolerable there. The arrangement I had made with Mr. Lowell for teaching during half of each year, I should have carried out had my mother lived; but it was never meant, in my own mind, to last for ever. Now, it seemed that the moment to make the change had come. My brother assures me that I shall have a little income that more than supplies my wants; Boston, with no home there, with no place to dine in night after night but that odious Colonial Club, is too distressing a prospect. Here, on the other hand, everything is alluring. My books (the only earthly chattels I retain) are at the avenue de l’Observatoire; that is my headquarters for the present. Meantime I am looking about, and if some place or some circle makes itself indispensable to my happiness, there I will stay. Intellectually, I have quite enough on hand and in mind, to employ all my energies for years.

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