Author: David Spiech Page 53 of 283

To Corliss Lamont
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. June 8, 1950

The argument from the simplicity of the transcendental ego is good, I think, but does not touch the “soul,” the psyche, or the person－and the crowning argument in the Phaedo about the number 3 being immortally odd (which you don’t dwell on in your summary of the arguments there) is also good but tautological: Socrates conceived as existing can never be (conceived as) dead; but it has nothing to do with time. This play between time and eternity in the more intelligent discussions of the subject has always interested and exasperated me. You have noticed, I see, what I think about Dante’s people in Purgatory and Paradise (in Hell they are more repetitions or continuations of their life on earth) that they are only the truth or the lesson of their existence in time, and evidently will never do anything or learn anything new. They are living monuments to themselves. But Dante could never have acknowledged that this is all that salvation can be, or union with God, who is non-temporal, because a material “other life” is required by the Jewish-Christian doctrine of the resurrection of the flesh.

Has the belief in heaven been more often a longing not to live, than to live forever? I almost think so. And you know the verses of St. Theresa and St. John of the Cross: “Muero porque no muero”.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To George Sturgis
Paris. June 7, 1922

Thank you for your letters of April 30, May 15, and May 24, the first of which crossed with my last to you. Please give Josephine my love and tell her I am sorry Arthur’s health is so deeply affected; but he has youth and no doubt courage, as well as good care, to help him through. As to your aunt Susie’s outburst on this subject, it is nothing to what you would hear everyday in that household. They live in an atmosphere of such intense partisanship in politics and religion that all the patriotism, self-sacrifice, or good policy and insight which they would praise on their own side seem to them criminal on the part of the enemy. Your aunt Susie is intelligent, and ought to be above this sort of thing; but more than intelligent she is, and has always been, enthusiastic and passionate. It has been her charm; but it has driven her to exaggerate her own allegiances and force herself to defend them in exaggerated language. In her heart she doubts and sees that it is, or may be, all make-believe; but this only intensifies her determination to blind herself and to bluff it out. It is very sad, because her convictions have not really brought her any happiness. She was seventy years old yesterday: you must overlook this aggressiveness in her language now and then, which is prompted by old scores which she has against things in general. She is hitting back with such weapons as remain to an old woman. I wish human nature and old age were more beautiful.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. June 6, 1947

Did I tell you that I have got a volume of Camus that I long ago asked for and one of plays by Sartre from Paris? They are clever but nasty. Everything now seems to be rotten.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, Cambridge MA.

To George Sturgis
Savoy-Hotel, Rue de Rivoli
Paris. June 5, 1936

I arrived here yesterday from Rome, and though the hotel is dingy and evidently has known better days, the view from my windows, over the Tuileries Gardens and the river is magnificent, and the breakfast (the only meal I have had here so far) very good, so that I shall probably stay here the whole summer. Politically and in general aspect, Paris at this moment seems far more unhappy and stricken than Italy, where everything is buzzing. There were no regular papers published yesterday, and the restaurants I went to—the Régence & Poccardi’s—seemed deserted. But I daresay nothing tragic will occur for the present.

You are held up in regard to my domicile. No domicile is indicated in my passport, but I have a separate Certificado de nacionalidad in which I am described as residing at the Hotel Bristol in Rome, which is the truth, in so far as the question is relevant to a fox that hasn’t a hole or a bird that hasn’t a nest. When Onderdonk years ago made investigations about my legal status—he is a timid and fussy person about legalities—he decided that my domicile was Avila, because that had been my father’s residence and I was still in possession of the house he had lived in, although it was let. Now that house has been “sold” to the Sastres. Perhaps my last regular domicile was my mother’s house in Longwood. I forget the name of the Street—was it 75 Monmouth Street? I know I called that my domicile and not my rooms in Cambridge, when it was a question of town taxes.

Perhaps, if that holds over after 25 years residence nowhere else in particular, the fact would facilate making an American will.

You send me the latest reports about the sale of my novel, also reaching me from Scribner’s directly, to the effect that it is still selling well—after being first for 3 months and a half—and having reached 148,500 copies. The English sales have been nothing in comparison, about 7,000 up to April 1^st including about 2,000 for Canada. Mr. Kyllmann of Constable’s says he hoped for much more. On the other hand, it is being printed in raised letters for the blind which seems to put it on a par with the Bible in soul-saving power. The blind shall read it!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo 6
Rome. June 4, 1951

Dear Clemens,

No, thank you, I think you had better give the Duke of Windsor’s Memoirs to some one else.

My article on Tom Sawyer and Don Quixote (not Mark Twain, except indirectly) was today left to be typed and will probably reach you within a fortnight.

I return the review of my book in Newsweek, which I had already seen; but I have no scrap-book and candidates for such a mausoleum have to choose between my head and the waste-paper basket. There has not been, as far as I know, any serious or adequate review of my book, and that circumstance is intelligible, because it is not a book to read at one sitting or to place at once in the school-master’s list of graded praise and blame, which seems to be what critic’s think their vocation.

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.