Author: David Spiech Page 4 of 283

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome, April 9, 1949

Dear Clemens,

No: I have no long-distance (or short-distance) radio, and no desire to listen to any broadcasting, which with my deafness I should not understand. It is not in my . . . power to regulate what people may say or publish about me, but I have repeatedly begged you not to busy yourself about me. I don’t think you are the right man to do so; but I suppose publicity is your profession and you are willing to take up any subject that seems to supply “copy”.

It is the same with visitors and interviews. People come to see me without asking leave or needing introductions, and between 5 and 7 p.m. I see them, and occasionally feel that perhaps it has been of some interest, and not merely a passtime, like going to see the oldest old woman in the village.

If you write me more letters and get no answer, please understand that, as far as my consent is required for any useless project, I do not give it, but that the thing may nevertheless be realized if the essor vital in the persons concerned is irresistible. I like to be quiet, but do not undertake to stop the steam-roller of modern enterprise.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948–1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript:William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. April 8, 1931

I am glad you have put your theory of perception into its final shape, and shall be interested in seeing—and hearing—the terms in which you now express it. As to Relativity, I may not be able to follow your arguments and am, in a sense, less personally interested, because I have come to a quietus of my own on the subject. When you are here, if you still want to work, I can give you a book of Maritain’s in which Einstein is treated intelligibly and intelligently, though of course from a far distant point of view. I am, in my old age, acquiring the faculty which Leibniz said he had of agreeing with Everybody. I agree with Maritain, but I agree with Einstein also: it is only a question of the place which one assigns to certain sorts of science or speculation. Maritain thinks what I call “specious” absolute: and it is, for the moralist or the poet: it is the spiritual reality. But the test of material Existence is practical: so that the tables are turned when you approach cosmology. The cosmology of Maritain is pure myth, as that of Einstein is sheer mathematics.

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 Isabella Stewart Gardner
75 Monmouth Street
Brookline, Massachusetts. April 7, [1902?]

Dear Mrs Gardner,

It was a delightful surprise to see your handwriting last night, when I got home and found your kind note and interesting present. It is very good of you to remember me. I haven’t been very well for the last year, and busier every day, and more of a hermit, so that your message seems to bring me up again into the land of the living, and I hope soon to have got enough of my fleshly substance back to become visible in the polite world. Talking of hermits, it occurs to me that you may not have seen another collection of verses of mine with that title—my poetical wastepaper-basket and closing of accounts with the Muses. I send you a copy in case anything in it— perhaps the translation from Théophile Gautier—may interest you. I am proud to see that you have placed my other verses on your honourable list. I wish they were more worthy but I was only a poet by youth, not by genius.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]–1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston MA.

To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont St Oxford
April 6, 1919

Dear Smith,

Both you and Mr Kyllmann are very good. Of course, a new and more manageable edition of the Life of Reason has been the dream of my life, but it must be a revised edition. I don’t mean that I think it worth while to rewrite the book: if I attempted it, I should spoil whatever may be good and fresh about it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910–1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC.

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. April 5, 1946

Dear Rosamond:

Yesterday came your parcel with heat pads and soap. Thank you very much. Soap is always in season, and not to be bought here except (I suppose) in the black market. The heat pads are late for the winter of this year, but will be useful when the autumn comes and interesting as a mechanical novelty—an application, as it were, of atomic bombs for the home and for the stomach. My critics used to upbraid me, when I said I was a materialist, by urging that matter was something passive and dead, but I hope they are now discovering that it is surprisingly explosive. When I warm my feet or my stomach with your pads, I shall meditate on the kindly way in which iron particles can communicate their secret vitality to torpid old age and to a lazy spirit.

I am reading a book in two volumes by Stalin on Leninism, in an excellent Italian translation. There are a lot of interesting books to be had in Italian cheap if one only hears of them. Stalin is very clear and frank. We are all to be liquidated. The question is whether somebody won’t want to liquidate the liquidaters. Spring has come, trees are green and blooming, and I am working nicely on my next book.

Yours affectionately

G Santayana

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.