Author: David Spiech Page 94 of 283

To Dorothy Shakespear Pound
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 24, 1946

Dear Mrs. Pound,

I have much appreciated your husband’s letter telling me that p. 6 of my book had reconciled him to the frivolity of the rest. I know he is very selective and “subjective”; and a ray of mutual understanding is of value with such a person. I have also received his new Canto, and should have written to him about it if a ray of light from it had been able to pierce my thick skull. But really I can’t catch the drift of his allusions.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 23, 1946

A magnificent bouquet arrived from you this morning, intended for Christmas. It serves just as well now, and I am sure that your good wishes are not confined to feast days any more than my leisure. Every day is a holiday and a birthday and a possible last day for a philosopher.

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

To Bernard Berenson
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Nov. 22, 1925

It is pleasant to hear that the Dialogues have entertained you. Why don’t you cut yourself a fresh quill and give us again a little of your own wisdom? There is a subject which I should be tempted to attack if people would listen to me, as they would to you, I mean aesthetic arrogance. We are living in an age of emancipated specialists, or of people who give out that they are specialists; and the public is not served, but bidden to believe and obey. These specialists, in other matters, are often persons of no culture or judgement, but one in physics, another in logic, another in economics, another in art, assure us that they are each of them infallible. . . .   The liberty of craftsmen to amuse themselves and invent what toys they will, is one thing; the function of adorning a civilized city with the monuments and elegances which express its instinct, is quite another. But the result of anarchy in our society seems to be a crop of small persons who, by sheer effrontery, make themselves tyrants in their respective fields.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Villa I Tatti, Settignano, Italy

To Boylston Adams Beal
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, S.W.1
Rome. November 21, 1927

All my love for England has somehow congealed into a memory, with a great dread of destroying it by any new impressions. My last trip, in 1923, when I went to give the Herbert Spencer lecture at Oxford, was very unpleasant. Howard Sturgis, whom I always used to visit, was dead: Russell, the wicked earl, I saw, but found curiously estranged, saying I had been “disloyal” to him, and at the same time showing that he had entirely forgotten the degree of confidence which he had reposed in me in the early days, and even the events which might have convinced him that I was entirely devoted to him. This is a pathological forgetfulness in part; but it goes with other changes which make it more painful than pleasant for me to see him. . . . I live at the Hotel Bristol (which I think you used to frequent) and have comfortable rooms looking towards the Palazzo Barberini; the noise from the Square reaches me, but the bit of garden in front, and the air of retirement, help one to imagine that all is peace. I go out for lunch, at some restaurant, and then walk in the Pincio and the Villa Borghese; in the evening I dine in my dressing gown in my own sitting-room. In Summer I go to Paris, sometimes also to Avila, or else to Cortina d’Ampezzo, in the Dolomites, which I have found perfect for my purposes, and on the way perhaps stop for two or three weeks at Venice, which I also find a congenial background. Essentially, it makes no diffference in my life where I happen to be, if only I am comfortable materially and undisturbed. My writing and reading keep me well occupied.I still have enough in prospect to occupy me for the rest of my days. . . .

Last summer I played an odd part in a sort of half-clandestine marriage. Margaret Strong, who hasn’t turned out at all like her father, has married a Chilean named Jorge Cuevas. She was always with him, but refused to introduce him to me, or to let her friends know that she was in Paris at all. We were living alone at the apartment, she and I, her father being at his favourite sanatorium in Switzerland, but I hardly ever saw her. Finally, one day, at lunch, I saw the table set for three, and the servant told me that at last the young man was going to be shown. So it happened: I said, “You are engaged?” and she said yes; and it transpired that they were to be married in four days and that I was to be the witness, sponsor, and substitute papa!

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