Author: David Spiech Page 4 of 283

To August H. Wagner
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. January 17, 1937

In my Reason in Religion, in the chapters on A Future Life and on Ideal Immortality, you will find all I have to say on the subject of your letter. You are free, as far as I am concerned, to quote from those chapters.—The only new light that I have seen since that now distant date comes from the German philosopher Heidegger, who defines death (which can be nothing for experience) as the wholeness of life. Death is only the fact that, like a piece of music, a life has a particular character and limits. You will find this elaborately set forth, on idealistic grounds, in Heidegger’s works.

Yours truly

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Collection of Robert Scheuermann, Beverly Hills, CA.

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 16, 1947.

From Ezra Pound I continue to receive communications: the last was stark mad: a few scattered unintelligible abbreviations on a large sheet of paper, and nothing else. Yet the address, although fantastically scrawled, was quite correct and intelligible. His madness may be spasmodic only.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Bertrand Arthur William Russell
Cambridge, Massachusetts. January 15, 1911.

It is a great bond to dislike the same things, and dislike is perhaps a deeper indication of our real nature than explicit affections, since the latter may be effects of circumstances, while dislike is a reaction against them.

I had hoped to go to Cambridge in June, but, now it is arranged that I shall go instead to California, where I have never been. I am both glad and sorry for this, but it seemed as well to see the Far West once in one’s life, especially as I hope soon to turn my face resolutely in the opposite direction.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Mills Memorial Library, Bertrand Russell Archives, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada.

To Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. January 14, 1949

Dear Mr Lipinski

I shall be very glad to sit for you any afternoon for the sketch that you wish to make of me. I have not sat for anyone since 1896, when Andreas Andersen did a charcoal drawing of me by the firelight in my room in Staughton Hall at Harvard, which to me seems the only real portrait that was ever taken of me.

I do not usually see the Atlantic Monthly, and should be glad, not that it is necessary as an introduction, to see a photograph of anything that you have drawn.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript:Collection of Lino S. Lipinsky de Orlov.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Address: C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
Polstreath,Megairssey,
Cornwall, England.  Jan. 13, 1917

I wish I could talk with you about the war and the glimmerings of peace: apart from Boylston Beal . . . I am still pursued by the fatality of having only radical or pro-German friends, and it tries my patience sorely. Why will clever people be so frivolous, captious, and pert-minded? Hooker said “nothing is so malapert as a splenetic religion”, but nothing makes me so splenetic as a malapert judgment in politics. After all, religion is congenitally the sphere of fancy and passion: but people ought to be serious in their views of this world. Don’t you think the Allies have made most happy replies to the German and the American notes?

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.