Author: David Spiech Page 3 of 283

To Mr. Helder
Paris. May 28, 1906

Dear Mr Helder,
Your question about “Strong defenses” for individual immortality puzzles me a good deal—I can think of none. As to my personal opinion on the subject, you will find it expressed at length in the last two chapters of volume III of my book on “The Life of Reason”—the volume (which can be got separately) on “Reason in Religion”. But you will get little comfort out of it.
Yours truly,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Rome. May 27, 1939

I have written to “Settembrini” explaining that I might not go to Cortina so that he shouldn’t be alarmed if he found me absent when he arrived. I call him “Settembrini” after a personage in Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (about a nursing-home at Davos) who is a Freemason bursting with eloquence about the principles of 1789, and the rights of man and of reason. My friend’s real name is Michele Petrone, and he is professor of Italian literature at the University of Berlin; but in spite of his humanitarian principles he bitterly hates almost everything that human beings do. He is a dreadful bore, but so appreciative of my philosophy (he is translating Platonism and the Spiritual Life) that I have to accept his society with thanks; and as we speak Italian together, I get lessons gratis in that language which I am more and more clumsy in every day.

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 Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
C/o Brown Shipley & Co 123 Pall Mall
Rome. May 25/6, 1931

After I had finished the proofs of your Aristotle, the two volumes arrived, and I have now read the Socrates and Plato. I am partly reconciled to your intentional American and jocular medium; for I see that really you are not writing a history of Greek Philosophy at all, but a review of what the professors—chiefly English or Scottish—now say about it. You might have carried the joke out, and composed a perfect satire on all these controversies, on the theme which you indicate in several places, that the two and seventy sects come out by the same door wherein they went. And this is always the back door. All these professors are outsiders and interlopers, and the first thing to do if you had wished to study the ancients themselves should have been to become a believer in them, and to have let all these modern egotistical critics lie buried in their own dust. Plato and Aristotle speak for themselves, if you trust them, and if you want guidance, you have it, within the school and its living traditions, in the Neo Platonists, the Arabians, and the Scholastics.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. May 25, 1927

Thank you for your card. I am glad you liked Cory—not that I altogether like him myself—but he is going to make himself useful in clearing my Augean stables, and it is as well that he shouldn’t be disagreeable to my friends.

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

To Allison Delarue
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. May 24, 1949.

Dear Mr. Delarue,
Your kind note and Eugene Berman’s designs make me think of Paris and the Russian Ballet of fifty years ago rather than of Italy where I live pleasantly but far from all artists and festive shows.

They also make me think of an old friend who I understand has become a sort of patron empressario for ballets in New York, George de Cuevas.  His wife is the daughter of Charles Strong, with whom I had my pied-â-terre in Paris for many years; and I took his place (he being at a sanatorium in Switzerland) at his daughter’s marriage. You see how modern the existence of an old recluse may become in this “age-of-troubles”.

The Russian ballet was, of all modern novelties, the one that seemed to me to set the arts really on the highway again. But have they kept to it?

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ