Author: David Spiech Page 93 of 283

To Elizabeth Stephens Fish Potter
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall
I Tatti
Florence, Italy. November 30, 1912

You have not heard, perhaps, that my mother died soon after I left America. It was not an unexpected loss, and in one sense, as you know, it had really occurred long before, as my mother had not been herself for some years. Nevertheless, her death makes a tremendous difference in all our lives, as she had always been the ruling influence over us. She had a very strong will and a most steadfast character, and her mere presence, even in the decline of her faculties, was the central fact and bond of union for us. Now, everything seems to be dissolved.

. . . .

I was forgetting to tell you what is perhaps the only important fact—that I have resigned my professorship altogether, and don’t expect to go back to America at any fixed time. As you know, my situation at Harvard has never been to my liking altogether, and latterly much less so, because I began to be tired of teaching and too old for the society of young people, which is the only sort I found tolerable there. The arrangement I had made with Mr. Lowell for teaching during half of each year, I should have carried out had my mother lived; but it was never meant, in my own mind, to last for ever. Now, it seemed that the moment to make the change had come. My brother assures me that I shall have a little income that more than supplies my wants; Boston, with no home there, with no place to dine in night after night but that odious Colonial Club, is too distressing a prospect. Here, on the other hand, everything is alluring. My books (the only earthly chattels I retain) are at the avenue de l’Observatoire; that is my headquarters for the present. Meantime I am looking about, and if some place or some circle makes itself indispensable to my happiness, there I will stay. Intellectually, I have quite enough on hand and in mind, to employ all my energies for years.

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 Frank Jewett Mather
Grand Hotel
Rome. November 29, 1940

Your letter gives me particular pleasure because you notice something central and radical in my views, not as most critics and correspondents do something accidental if not merely imputed. Spirit, both as an evident reality discoverable by analysis in the fact of experience and as a plane of moral life, lies too near to be clearly seen, when attention is called to external events, as it necessarily is in daily life and in science. We must be patient with those who deny spirit, or confuse it with psychic forces or historical movements. . . . Isn’t the intellectual world much in the position it was in during the Roman Empire? Won’t it move towards similar issues? People like T. S. Eliot or like Prof. Collingwood (have you read his interesting Essay on Metaphysics?) are calling people back to spiritual interests and spiritual judgments, even if they relapse, in so doing, into mythology. I don’t mind that. It is so transparent a fiction that it can hardly distort the truth, however poetically it may express it. And a correct and economical definition of the concept of spirit, however desirable, is of little importance compared with the presence or absence of spirituality in the lives of men. Probably you detest idols more than I do; you have been surrounded by ugly ones. If people will only make their idols beautiful, I would not take those idols away from them for the world. It is the beautiful that they are really worshipping through those forms, which is what I worship also.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Max Forrester Eastman
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. November 28, 1936

Dear Mr. Eastman,
Your letter reaches me when I had just written to your publishers saying I was ashamed to confess that I couldn’t understand a word of your book.¹ If I had been writing to you I should have expressed the matter differently. I can understand your own words, and no doubt I should see a part, at least, of your reasons for making the distinctions you make in the kinds of the comic. My difficulty is with this comic universe itself. There is where everything eludes me in so far as it is supposed to be comic and in so far as the comic is supposed to be a part of the good. To me all these jokes seem rather ghastly. And the enjoyment of laughter, rather than a painful twist and a bit of heart-ache at having to laugh, perhaps, at such things at all, being your whole subject, I say I don’t understand a word of your book. That is, I am not able to share the happy experience that inspires you to write it.

Never mind. You are probably in the same case (although you don’t say so) about my “Realm of Essence.” Why trouble about it? No one is going to hell, or even to the stake, for being a victim, in some direction, of “invincible ignorance.”
Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

1. Enjoyment of Laughter (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1936).

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

To Robert Traill Spence Lowell Jr.
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 27, 1948

Your previous letter, which I have not answered, set me thinking on the meaning of “agreeing to differ”. I don’t like the stock phrase: it is ambiguous. We must all differ more or less in everything because we are complex unique compounds of different parents and different circumstances: even brothers or twins are wholly individual and irreproducible. But there is also a sense in which “differing” is a disappointment, not a sign of integration on both sides. It suggests that we hoped to agree and ought to have done so, only one or both of us was perverse or blind; and we have to put up with these faults in one another.

That which I call the “Spirit” is potentially omniscient, being the pure faculty of apprehension; and in the exercise of this faculty (which is an animal activity like any other, and not emotionally indifferent) we may take a certain pride; but love of the object so discerned or the mental process so executed is a personal matter. The indulgence may disturb the harmony of your life; it may be, for you, a waste of energy or a vice; so that even the mere cognisance of its possibility may not be worth while for you personally, although “Spirit” in you would a priori wish to be omniscient. But spirit incarnate cannot be omniscient nor absolutely impartial; and therefore there are things (as Aristotle says) that it is better not to know. I think Aristotle would have been speculatively wiser if he had said “better not to know for a particular natural creature”; but he was wise only as a moralist.

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

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 26, 1945

Two more parcels from you have arrived almost together, one with the most desirable sweater (which I should call a wollen waistcoat) and thick wollen socks, and the other with S. S. Pierce’s regulation ideal groceries for all normal persons. I have already had the coffee and the tea, although the festive fruit cake is still holding out bravely: which is the sort of over-lapping of good things that Goethe used to value so much in his love-affairs, saying that he liked to see the moon rise while the sun was still shining. That is certainly a comfort to the stomach, although I should think it might be embarrassing for the heart.

Army men have almost stopped coming to have their books autographed: I suppose they are leaving these parts for home, or at least for Germany. But there is a Mr. Gowen at Mr. Myron Taylor’s office who brings notabilities to see me, I don’t know why, except that people who are used to being busy need to be doing something or other when they have nothing to do. Last week he brought Monsieur et Madame Maritain; he is a Catholic philosopher now Ambassodor from France to the Pope; and this week he has brought the Marchesa Marconi, a distinctly beautiful woman, not in her first youth, but we may say in her second, since she is a widow. That, however, cannot be the reason why she should come to see me at my age, and there was really nothing that we could talk about with a real interest. But she was very amiable, and so tall—a good deal taller than I—that I couldn’t help being impressed and ashamed of myself for not being younger, taller, and more a man of the world.

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