Author: David Spiech Page 84 of 283

To Benjamin Apthorp Gould Fuller
Anglo-American Nile Steamer & Hotel Company
Chief Office, Sharia Boulac, Cairo
Luxor, Egypt. January 11, [1905]

Dear Fuller,

I am at this moment going up the Nile with an impossible party of tourists, conscious of being no less grotesque myself than the rest of them. So many labour-saving-machines have left us no time for anything, else I should like to travel long in the East and yield for a time to its fascinations. People here seem to realise something of Faust’s dream, to be young in body and old in spirit. What an amusing place the world would be to such a creature. We sometimes speak of regretting lost illusions. What a silly idea! We may well regret lost powers, but the loss of illusions is an unmixed benefit. It leaves you free face to face with the facts and authorizes you to profit by every real opportunity. The trouble is that, the Life of Reason being so largely in abeyance, people do not ordinarily lose their illusions till they have lost their passions, and then the real world, when they see it for the first time as it is, seems to them stale, not because it is real but because they are played out.

I may perhaps go to Jerusalem and Damascus before returning to Europe. The donkey is losing its terrors for me and I now generally ride at the head of the party. Think what a party it must be!

Yours,

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Victor Francis Calverton
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 10, 1935

We mustn’t prolong this discussion for ever, because while we agree about the facts (or should agree if I were better informed) we make a different diagnosis and have different expectations. You think the American baby was weak and puling for a hundred years because it had never cut its umbilical cord, when there were plenty of native green apples and native whisky on which it might have grown up healthy and vigorous; whereas I think that that umbilical cord (the genteel tradition) scarcely sufficed to keep its thin soul alive under the pressure of bleak winter and child labour. You speak of “American culture”: what is that? I have known American lack of culture, and American cultivated people: but they were Americans in their residence and in their persons, not in their culture. Their culture came in part through England, but ultimately rather from France, Italy, and ancient Greece: for there can’t be a native culture except where there are no known moral derivations or origins, as was practically the case in Greece, in Egypt, and in China. In the modern world, all nations have, and can’t help having, the same culture, communication and information being so permeating and relentless as they are.

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

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 9, 1933

Mrs. Van Meter Ames, wife of a young prof. of phil. in Cincinnati, has sent me an account of my conversations with them at lunch at the Castello dei Cesari and elsewhere: a sort of Boswell to this Johnson. It makes me out rather like a red-faced old Major in Bath spluttering his damn-mes and don’t-you-knows about things in general: but I have no objection, and have only corrected the English which good innocent Mrs. Ames imagines that I speak.

I have received, from an objectionable friend in Boston, an objectionable book by Bernard Shaw, called A Black Girl in Search of a God. There are amusing turns, but as a whole it is trash. Do you care to have it?

The novel is advancing slowly but solidly. I feel that I have solved the greatest difficulty in the earlier part, viz., the yacht episodes. . . . I feel greatly encouraged in my own mind, and have hopes of really finishing it. I have rewritten a few pages of the Prologue, making more marked the difference between my talk and Mario’s. This was one of Strong’s objections, which I thought well grounded. Fas est ab hoste doceri.

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 Robert Seymour Bridges
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 8, 1925

Through the more and more frankly confessed mythical character of exact science—I . . . have been recognizing of late that the church is a normal habitation for the mind, as impertinent free thought never is. But there remains the old misunderstanding, the forcing of literature into dogma, and the intolerable intolerance of other symbols, where symbols are all. Here in Rome, in the Pincio and the Villa Borghese, I often watch with amazement the troops of theological students of all nations, so vigorous and modern in their persons, and I ask myself whether these young men can truly understand and accept the antique religion which they profess—especially the Americans (very numerous) with their defiant vulgar airs and horrible aggressive twang. Could the monks of Iona and the Venerable Bede have been like this? Was it perhaps after some ages of chastening that the barbarians could really become Christian and could produce a Saint Francis?

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

To Boylston Adams Beal
Hotel Bristol
Rome. January 7, 1934

Thank you for your letter of Dec. 7 and for the cutting from the Harvard Register. Please don’t trouble about looking up those other birthday tributes: they are too much like obituary notices. Unless my “novel” should ever be finished and published, which might make a real flame burst out one way or the other, I can imagined the kindly sunset glow in which, at least in public, I shall be allowed to sink into oblivion. But I still have a string or two to my bow, which not all my American friends are aware of; I don’t mean only the “novel”, but fresh philosophic criticism and exposition. It all depends on my powers of work not failing too fast.

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.