Author: David Spiech Page 79 of 283

To [Mary Williams Winslow]
[Seville, Spain] [February 1914]

[There are] three theatres here with several pieces in one night: you take a ticket for each piece separately, which costs one franc, and lasts one hour. There is also a cine installed in the Opera House, which on the fashionable nights—Mondays and Thursdays—is crowded with very nice-looking people. The Sevillians are quite charming, in all ranks of life, and handsomer than other Spanish people—a singularly ugly race. To be sure, they would seem more beauteous if they were better washed; the idea of self-scrubbing has only just percolated into the upper strata of society. There is a magnificent shop with plate-glass windows full of bathroom things opposite the Cathedral: it attracts great admiration from the public returning from the Delicias; they stand in wondering family groups before it, as if it contained an exhibition of marbles for the drawing-room and the cemetery—indeed, it looks very much like that sort of thing. I too stop and marvel; on my right the Cathedral—the retreat of art and religion—on my left, the conquering advance of plumbing.

Unless the heat drives me away, I mean to stay here until after the Fair and the bullfights in April, so that I shall have a chance of telling you more about my discoveries and inventions in Seville. When I first arrived I had a touch of my old enemy, the bronchial cough; but I manage to drive it off. It was fearfully cold in the house in Avila and Madrid, also here when I came; but now the sun has come out strong, and the dogs and the cabmen already seek the shade.

Tell Polly I am too old to be worth loving a great deal, because I shall be dead by the time she is old enough to be engaged!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. February 2, 1934

It is a very good idea of yours to write occasionally to S. and to prove—what is the fact—that you are a devoted philosopher. And that leads me to explain, in a word or two, what I felt in your essay to be an inconsistency between the beginning and the end. You come to the conclusion that pictorial experience is pictorial—you will understand what I mean by that. But you propose a problem at first which does not arise, if that conclusion is true: namely, the problem of the comparative simplicity of experience in contrast with the physical structure either of nature at large or of the human body in particular. Why on earth should feeling or perception not be simple? Why should the toothache picture the tooth or the cavity in it, or the histology of the brain? It doesn’t, and it can’t: and the idea that we must somehow explain why it doesn’t is based on a gnostic illusion, to the effect that perception is not sensation in the organ of perception but miraculous divine intuition of things as they are in themselves. As you say, that is at best an ideal for the intellect: we should like to know things thoroughly, to imagine what they must be in themselves, as we like to enact dramatically what we suppose may be the feelings of other people. But when the object is not another human mind, that ideal is unattainable, and rather foolish: because the function of ordinary perception is not sympathetic but utilitarian. This is only a hint: the constitutional uselessness of the mental side of things is another point important in my view, but perhaps better left alone.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Mary Williams Winslow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London. S.W.1.
Rome. February 1, 1922

In a previous letter you asked me what news of Boston or Harvard it would interest me to hear, and in my walks I have sometimes asked myself the question again, and haven’t found it easy to answer. It is not that my interest has waned—on the contrary, I feel I should like so much to see (through a peep-hole) all that may be going on and to understand it. But what is going on? My ideas are too vague for the inquiry to start at all. Of course, I can see the electric cars going over the Harvard Bridge and I can imagine others, much longer and swifter, going through the subway; and I can imagine you and Fred and (by a stretch) the children as they must look in your library in Clarendon street; but what is going on under all those appearances? They tell me everything is quite different morally: Boylston Beal, the Potters, your dear friend Apthorp Fuller (who is here with his mother) inform me that when at home they feel like fish out of water, and that America is fast going to the dogs—or, more accurately, that it is sinking into a bog of commonplaceness and youthful folly which makes them feel like frustrate ghosts. Now, I don’t believe a word of it; and if you will sometimes give me a hint of what has changed, and in what direction, I think I could supply the rest out of my old knowledge . . . You, who know my friends (as Mrs Toy doesn’t), could show me how the wind blows in this social quarter—more interesting romantically than the political world, and even more important, because at bottom it controls the turn of public affairs—I mean, that moral changes in society, if they don’t determine political events, certainly colour the result and give it all its importance . . . Are the poorer classes in America still hopeful and loyal to the established order, or are there any signs of revolution? I ask all these semi-political questions because I have a feeling that we are approaching a great revolution and impoverishment of the world, such as has actually occurred in Russia, and I look for signs, not so much of its coming soon, but of the angle at which it will attack our old society, and the elements of it that may survive. Of course, I think the revolutionists, if they succeed, will suffer a horrid disappointment, because most of them will have to die off: the two great conditions for improving the lot of mankind are a much smaller population and a much larger proportion of people devoted to agriculture.

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 George Sturgis
Grand Hotel
Rome. January 31, 1941

Dear George,

The Credito Italiano telephoned this morning to say the lire miste had arrived, and awaited my convenience. Unluckily I had a relapse, complicated by a colic (something antedeluvian in my history, but perhaps this is one form of a second childhood) and although better and quite comfortable I am still confined to my rooms. I get up and have my meals and receive my doctor in my salotto or sitting-room. For six nights I had a nurse who gave me my medicines and much conversation. She says there are too many children. Her two boys, being a widow, bring her no end of work in order to provide for their superior education. Evidently society is in a fluid state. I hope the end of this war will bring a new organization that may last, in fundamentals, for a thousand years. I mean in all countries.

I had never heard of lire miste, nor had my doctor (although he is a Jew, and a very nice person). From what the man at the Credito Italiano said this morning, I gather that a non-Italian bank is involved in the issue. In any case, the better exchange will partly take the place of the 20% that I got these last two times from the government.

Thank you for sending Pepe my Xmas present for the children. Pepe’s daughter Josefina and his son Eduardo have written. She has two babies and he is expecting one. That is all they write about. Too many children!

Yours affly,

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.