Author: David Spiech Page 68 of 283

To David Page
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 28, 1946

Vice is common, but not a spontaneous expression of nature: rather a deviation caused by suppressing nature or overworking it.

For genuine naturalism, which has a tragic side, I should look to Homer rather than to Petronius; or on the social side, with town life, to Terence, whom I have been reading lately with great pleasure. His old men are so savoury, each with his private philosophy, and his young men so young, so helplessly in love, and so loyal. And the outlook is truly (not sentimentally) naturalistic: contented with limitations, bourgeois life, fixed principles, a fixed income, and parents who were just like their children and children who expect to be just like their parents, and respect them and themselves all the more on that account.

The “liberal” ill-will doesn’t matter: they have to be like that.

I am reading “Leninism” by Stalin, in an excellent Italian translation by the leader of the Communists here. Isn’t that a genuine form of naturalism? Of course the roots are not everything in nature: the flowers are just as natural: and for that reason levellers and anticlericals are not good naturalists. Don’t be the enemy of anything, nor the dupe of anything!

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

To Victor Wolfgang von Hagen
Via S. Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 26, 1950

I am hoping this summer to finish the revision of what is to be my last book, Dominations & Powers. After that I have no particular reason for remaining alive, although I shall certainly not be bored if I go on living.

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

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Grand Hotel
Rome. March 25, 1941

I have not felt like working. The introduction to the proposed new edition of Realms hangs fire, and so does Persons & Places; but the fire still burns under the ashes, and I am confident that it will break out before long into a modest flame of sorts, if not into any great illumination.

Ah, no! Ezra Pound has also been here: he is speaking through the radio for the government!

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 Ottoline Cavendish–Bentick Morrell
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, S.W.1
Rome. March 24, 1928

You mustn’t think that my affection for England has in the least cooled: only it has become retrospective, I like to think of what it used to be, and the present and future seem to offer nothing there that can tempt me.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928–1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin TX.