Author: David Spiech Page 87 of 283

To Shohig Sherry Terzian
Rome. December 27, 1937

I am overwhelmed by your unexpected birthday and Christmas present, not only a book, but a luxurious leather book-cover, such as I had never seen before, and other trappings. Have you perhaps left in your nature a feeling for Oriental ways? As I grow old, I feel reviving in myself an opposite instinct, a Castilian love of mended clothes, simple monotonous days, and a minimum of belongings. Having money makes no difference. If Don Quixote had been very rich he would have made magnificent gifts on occasion, but he would not have got a prancing horse or changed his linen any oftener. However, my aesthetic soul dotes on Oriental poetry and splendour, and on those total terrible changes of fortune that, among Orientals, can leave the soul so entirely detached and incorruptible.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Edward Joseph Harrington O’Brien
3 Prescott Hall
Cambridge, Massachusetts. December 26, 1910

Poetry in words, like fiction in life, is something which has ceased to be natural to me. . . . No doubt the faculty of dreams may be as precious as waking, and less wearisome than insomnia; but when one falls into prose, it is hard to rise again out of it. Another fiction which you amiably weave is the “quia multum amavit”  which you apply to me. Any love while we have it seems great; but we must, in retrospect, reduce things to some proportion.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin.

To George and Rosamond Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Christmas, 1935

Since yesterday I am living in a garden of white roses and violets—also a pot of azalias from my landlord who is a member of Parlaiment and head of the Fascist organization of hotel-keepers—and I am feeling that a sort of Santayana boom is going on in various quarters at once. Scrutiny, an ultra-critical intellectualist quarterly published at Cambridge (in England) has suddenly taken me up: I have written (feeling very lively during my illness) an article for their next issue, also one for the American Mercury; and the Scrutiny people, the editor and his wife, are going to edit a book of my collected literary criticisms. The novel, except for the review I sent you, has hardly been squarely faced: that may come later; but the critics seem to be favourable, without daring to commit themselves to any judgement or even analysis. I think perhaps the book in length and in subject is rather too much for them. You will see, and hear, what people will say in America. I don’t want to bother: what is done is done, and I am going on, while life lasts, with other matters.

The political situation, though dangerous, is exciting and helps to keep one young, at least in Italy. Life was never pleasanter here, at least for me, than it is now, and I admire the Italians in their courage, as I did the English during the war. I don’t so much admire them now. They are a nice people, but their minds are silly. Phrases and crazes completely take them in.

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
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Christmas Eve, 1938

My dear Clemens,

All you do and say seems to illustrate a theory which, in my intention, applies only to the last and highest reaches of the Spiritual life, and which I myself am incapable of practising. The truth no longer interests you unless you can turn it into a pleasing fiction. This interview with me I suppose is the same of which, years ago, you sent me a rough draft, where I suggested some corrections in view of that lower and servile criterion, truth. But probably in the interval the force of inspiration has been again at work, and you have produced a sheer poem. . . .

I return your Foreword, as I keep no files, the extreme modesty of my apartment (it’s not very cheap) precludes anything but a waste-paper basket.

I am at work on my last volume of formal philosophy, The Realm of Spirit; but if life lasts even longer, I daresay I shall find it impossible not to keep on writing something or other.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 23, 1936

I have now finished your book, except the French article which I remember pretty well and won’t re-read for the present. The total impression left on me is that you are to be congratulated on having turned out a compact volume, so well expressed, and that evidently satisfies you by the finality of its doctrine, and the conviction that the world, sooner or later, will have to accept it.

The book, however, is not easy reading, or very appealing to the imagination. You ought not to be disappointed if it is not widely read at first. You may exercise your influence perhaps indirectly through a few students who will adopt or adapt your doctrines and diffuse them in more popular forms.

You know that I am not inclined to discuss these matters any more. It would be useless, for both of us, and merely irritating. I agree with you in the view that there is a biological level beneath the psychological, and that all the dirty work is done below stairs, as it should be in any well-ordered household. But I see only confusion in using psychological terms for biological processes: except indeed when we do so, like Freud, with avowed figurative and mythological licence, because the biological detail is little understood, and it is only the large moral effects that interest us. My own thoughts, at present, are turned so decidedly in another direction that detailed psychological theory cannot hold my attention.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.