Author: David Spiech Page 253 of 283

To Charles Augustus Strong
22 Beaumont St
Oxford, England. September 29, 1917

My so-called second paper has given birth to various excursuses on “existence”, “consciousness”, etc, and I have run up against points which have puzzled me and made me vacillate in my views. What you call “semiexistence”, and I was inclined to accept or to call “specious existence” has given me special trouble. My conclusion now is that it is a mistake to speak of the essence as existing at all. What exists substantially is the organic or mind-stuff process; what exists actually and historically is the passing perception or intuition—a fact, a cognition, something spiritual, having a date and duration, but no substantial or efficacious existence; while the essence (though it would be pedantic not to say that it existed, while it is given or embodied) exists only by a current figure of speech, the true existence not belonging to it, but to the mind that perceives or to the thing that embodies it. Do you agree with this? I should be glad to know.

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 Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Danieli
Venice, Italy. September 28, 1939

Hans Reichhardt has given me the belated news that my friend Westenholz killed himself on August 5th; also that Hans’ mother died a week after he and his brother had been called away (for military service, I suppose) from home. We live in old-fashioned tragic times. Westenholz was an extraordinarily well-educated and intelligent person, omnivorous and tireless in following every intellectual interest, but hopelessly neurasthenic and psychopathic all his life, which had become of late a protracted nightmare. At my age the death of friends makes little impression; we are socially all dead long since, for every important purpose; but closing a life is (as Heidegger teaches) rounding it out, given it wholeness, and in one sense brings the entire figure of a friend more squarely before one than his life ever did when it was still subject to variations.

. . .

Thank you for George Sturgis’s letter. They seem to be in a dreadful state of excitement and mental confusion. He says they have four radios going at once in their house, don’t understand what is happening anywhere, and have no news of their son, aged 17, who is lost in “Europe”.

How quiet and simple life is in Italy—though now without coffee!

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

To Charles Augustus Strong
London. September 27, 1932

Dear Strong,

Your letter about Cory came at an unlucky moment when he was laid up with a touch of the “flu”, and had received a nice letter from the Journal of Philosophy, saying that his paper on Whitehead was accepted and that Whittredge had read it and liked it very much. Thus, for the moment, two of the points of your dissatisfaction were a little blunted, in that he seems to be really delicate, and to have advanced one step towards establishing himself in the public eye as a philosopher.

I feel hardly competent to advise you, from your point of view, about the wisdom of continuing to support Cory. If you regard him merely as a philosophical investment, I am not at all confident that he will ultimately justify your confidence: he has perception and an occasional intense spurt of industry, but on the whole his temperament is Irish and poetical, he is self-indulgent and capricious, and resents any attitude towards himself that is not one of complete disinterested sympathy and trust. For my own part, I feel perfectly willing to take him at his own valuation, and run the risk of wasting my sympathy—not entirely in any case, since I find him a pleasant companion, and a link with the younger intellectual generation.

It seems to me that, in your place, I should wish to continue to encourage him, in the hope that, as the years go by, he may prove more and more valuable to you as a disciple and friend. But I think, in that case, the experiment is more likely to be satisfactory if you leave him free to choose his residence and way of living, and above all the tone of his opinions, as his own temperament dictates. A check-rein is the worst possible harness for a colt of his mettle. Of course you should expect him to come and see you frequently, and to continue studying philosophy with a serious mind. But beyond that, I think pressure will be rather wasted on him. For instance, he might go on living in England, but remain shut up in his bedroom, reading Proust and Pater and T. S. Eliot: evidently he might as well have read them sitting in the sun in the Riviera. I myself have always wished that he should mingle with refined English people of the intellectual type—like old Bridges, for instance, or Bertie Russell But it has to be, if at all, in his own way: and you and I are too old, and too much out of the world, to expect him to choose his best friends in our small circle.

As to his returning to New York—that too was originally my idea of what might be best for him. But isn’t it rather too late now? If you drop him, and he has to do that, it might be the making of him: but I certainly should still feel responsible for his future after having tempted him to remain so long out of his country and almost idle. Yours ever G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Venice, Italy. September 26, 1935

Of course it is gratifying to have this sudden boost, but someone must have it, apparently, every month, and really it’s not extravagant to think that The Last Puritan, which is a major work and original in some respects, should have been chosen1 to be one of the twelve in one year. What this does show is that the committee were not too much disturbed by my picture of America or of erotic friendships: but the critics, some of them, will probably rage. Never mind: we will pocket the $5000 and the rest of the profits with thanks, and go our own way. A tactless friend has sent me a review of Iris’s book, in which my “foreword” is called “boring and obese”. What would the critic say if he saw me in the flesh? And what wrath won’t he pour on The Last Puritan? I asked Edman what he thought people would think, and he said they would scrutinize the Prologue and Epilogue so as to make out how much of myself there was in the book; and he asked whether I had any special intention in saying, at the end of the Prologue, that I would report the facts only in so far as discretion allowed. In other words, they smell a rat, and want to know (very indiscreetly) whether the rat is in me, or only in my book. You will be bothered all your life with questions of this kind, if you become my official interpreter. I think it might be prudent on your part to say that you knew nothing about my private history in my earlier years. It is the truth, as is natural with more than forty years’ difference in our ages; and I think even my contemporaries, if not inventive, would have to say the same thing. The fact is that there is very little to know, except what can be got by psychoanalysis out of my prose and poetry. But this whole interest in an author’s medical history is vile and morbid, and ought to be squelched as severely as possible. It is another question, and legitimate, to like or not to like the sentiments that an author has actually expressed.

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 Horace Meyer Kallen
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London S.W.1
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. September 25, 1926

I live by rule, as in a monastery, never go out in the morning or evening, but have lunch at 12:30 or l o’clock at some restaurant, then take a walk until tea-time, and then return to my hotel, where I dine upstairs in my cell. If you will make a similar arrangement for your meals, which they call half-pension, I hope you will come and lunch with me every day, while you remain in Rome, and then I can show you, not the sights, but the pleasant places where I take my constitutional, and we can discuss eternal and temporal matters in the mild golden light of autumn—very like that of Limbo.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: American Jewish Archives, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Cincinnati OH