Category: LETTERS Page 1 of 274

Letters in Limbo ~ October 10, 1917

On October 10, 2024

To Susan Sturgis de Sastre
22 Beaumont St.
Oxford, England. October 10, 1917

Some time has passed since I have written to you or Josephine and you may like to hear that I am sin novedad. My lodgings here and the routine of my life in Oxford suit me pretty well, and when I go away it is always to return with a sense of relief and freedom. Of course, it is well for me to have a little change occasionally, and see people. I went some time ago to Bath to meet my old friend Moncure Robinson, who is now a confirmed old bachelor of forty-two with luxurious habits. He took me in his motorcar to London where he has a house, and I spent one night there before going on to Lord Russell’s, whose wife No 3 has now come back to him, so that she is as good as if she were No 4. They were having a middle-aged second honey-moon.embarrassing and not very agreeable sight for the by-stander. The lady, however, is very nice to me, pretends to read my books, etc. I made attempts some time ago to send you one of her novels, but I suppose the censor intercepted it. I ought to have had it sent by the publisher; in that case they let books through, I believe, but I am not sure that you would really be amused by her not very amiable recollections of her life in Germany.

In London I have seen Elsie Beal and her very plain daughter Betty, who is eighteen. They came with the idea of spending the winter in England, as Boylston is at the American embassy here: but Elsie is not amusing herself, and they are going back. Elsie is rather a wreck, looks like a Wigglesworth, and isn’t clever or kind enough to make up for her lost looks and manners, which last were never natural. The daughter is unaffected and robust, but deplorably ugly, except for a nice complexion.

My chief preoccupation now is a book to which Strong and I are contributing: it is to be published in America, and there is a lot of sending manuscript and comments—we are trying to agree, at least in our vocabulary—to and fro, which often involves delays due to the necessity of getting permits from the censor, and the slowness of communications. We haven’t yet lost anything at sea, however, which I suppose is rather good luck under the circumstances. Strong writes from Switzerland: “Margaret has been in Zurich for a month, riding, going to the opera, & dancing the tango (with an Argentinian dancing-master named Fernandez!!!). She comes back on Sunday to lead a sober and I hope literary life at this institution. I am flourishing generally but disabled still as to my feet—half dead from the knees down. But the future is not unhopeful”.

Oxford, which has been full of cadets for a year, now has a new species—the American Aviation Corps, with their strange appearance—yet so familiar to me that I sometimes fancy I am at Harvard going to a foot ball game. One has brought a letter to me, but I found him rather dreadful..—I receive the Lectura Dominical regularly (on Saturdays). Love to all from Jorge Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Alderman Library, University of Virginia at Charlottesville

Letters in Limbo ~ October 9, 1926

By David Spiech

On October 9, 2024

In LETTERS

To Lawrence Smith Butler
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.l.
Venice, Italy. October 9, 1926

Your business address and the neat appearance of your type-written letter, involving an animate as well as an inanimate typewriter, open vistas of you in a new atmosphere. Are you working really hard and building Babylonian skyscrapers? I hope this will not prevent you from coming to see me—you will need a rest—and please don’t bring either the animate or the inanimate typewriter with you.

No, I have not seen “The Story of Philosophy” and have forgotten if they ever asked me for a photo. I now have been reproduced especially for reproduction by Swain & Co, New Bond Street, London, W. to which your friends the publishers can send for a portrait of me in my 60th year; it is not good, too much touched up, but will serve for the public. My real portrait is the drawing by Andreas Andersen.

P.S. Like a lady, I forgot the object of this letter until it was finished. Of course I shall be glad to read your journal of the trip round the world, but why should I, who am not a circumnavigator, write a preface for it? What should I say in it? However, if on seeing it I should be inspired, the thing might be done. This summer I have written a whole book—a little one—on the spur of the moment, thinking it would be merely a review of Dean Inge on “The Platonic tradition in English religious thought,” but it grew into an independent treatise of my own on how to become a saint without letting anybody know it. It is to be called “Platonism and the Spiritual life” and is very Indian. You may not like it all, because it is not specifically Christian, but I will send you a marked copy, where the orthodox pages shall have a little red cross at the top.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The University Club, New York NY.

Letters in Limbo ~ October 8, 1926

By David Spiech

On October 8, 2024

In LETTERS

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Danieli
Venice, Italy. October 8, 1926

Yesterday I went sight seeing, on foot, to the Findecca and the Island of San Giorgio Maggiore, crossing by the ferry, and I was surprised at the small size of the Tintorettos which I remembered as vast epical designs.
The interior of Italian churches is cold, and leaves me cold: these festive buildings are better as distant features or backgrounds in the landscape. San Giorgio as I see it at this moment from my window through a slight haze is certainly a poetical object: near to, and inside, it seems only an architect’s model in an old curiosity shop.
Mrs. Toy has sent me some newspaper cuttings about the philosophical congress at Harvard: it seems even less interesting than I should have expected.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

Letters in Limbo ~ October 7, 1931

By David Spiech

On October 7, 2024

In LETTERS

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel de Londres,
Naples, Italy. October 7, 1931

Dear Cory,

I am glad to have news of you and to see that Paris, your aunt, and Simone, with their united charms, don’t altogether wean you from divine philosophy. That being so, let me add a few words about “natural Moments”. When I say they are elements of description, I mean that I don’t conceive the flux to be composed of solid temporal blocks, with a click in passing from one to the next. That may be Strong’s conception, but although I should say that points and instants are necessary elements of description (geometry is an excellent method of description in regard to the realm of matter) I don’t think points or instants are natural units. Natural moments, on the other hand, though there need be no click between them (sometimes there is a click, as when a man dies, a man’s life being a natural moment) yet supply the only possible, and the most intimate, units composing the flux. For how describe the flux except by specifying some essence that comes into it or drops out of it? And the interval between the coming and the going of any essence from the flux of existence is, by definition, a natural moment. Be it observed also that these moments are not cosmic in lateral extension; they are not moments of everything at once: so that when one comes to an end, almost everything in the universe will run on as if nothing had happened. Spring every year and youth in every man are natural moments, so is the passage of any image or idea in a mind; but the change (so momentous in that private transformation) is far from jarring the whole universe, but passes silently and smoothly, removing nothing ponderable, and adding nothing in the way of force to the steady transformation of things. I am curious to see how you refute Whitehead on causation. Didn’t that seem to us to be one of his good points?

Yours affty G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928-1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

Letters in Limbo ~ October 6, 1886

By David Spiech

On October 6, 2024

In LETTERS

To Henry Ward Abbot
Schiffbauerdamm 3II
Berlin, Germany. October 6, 1886

Dear Abbot.
I said, I believe, in my last letter that I would write before long again, because I had more to say in answer to all you told me than I could put into one letter. I have put off writing all this time partly because I thought I might possibly hear from you, and partly because I was afraid of making myself a nuisance. But I have felt like writing to you very many times. You asked why I take an interest in you, which after all it is natural I should take; but since that time I have been forced to wonder myself why I take so much interest in you. And as far as I can see the reason is this. I suspect you are going through a critical period, and I feel that you are dissatisfied with yourself. Why are you dissatisfied with yourself? Another man, I for instance, would be satisfied to be as you are. You are not dissatisfied with yourself because you can’t do what other people do and what is expected of a man, but because you imagine you can’t do something very excellent which you feel somehow drawn to do. Now I am interested in seeing if you are going to attempt this something excellent, or not; whether you are going to prefer to live on moodily, taking refuge more or less in dissipation, or whether you are going to start out in some direction where you see something you really value. It isn’t at all a question of what you can accomplish; it is only a question of what attitude you are going to take, what sort of things you are going attend to. Now you know that I am as willing that people should worship the devil as that they should worship God; I only ask in whose service will they live more smoothly, gracefully, and intelligently. It’s all prejudice and point of view to say that one sort of life is better than another, because it pursues different objects. All that an emancipated man asks is which objects attract him most, and what are the means of attaining those objects. To do right is to know what you want. Now when you are dissatisfied with yourself, it’s because you are after something you don’t want. What objects are you proposing to yourself? are they the objects you really value? If they are not, you are cheating yourself. I don’t mean that if you chose to pursue the objects you most value, you would attain them; of course not. Your experience will tell you that. Therefore a wise man won’t value anything much. But this wise indifference, this safeguard against disappointment, would come too soon if it came before a man had started in the direction of his true satisfactions. Indifference is quite premature if it leads a man to misunderstand his own desires. In the first place there is always some small chance of success; but success in getting after much labor what you really don’t care for is the bitterest and most ridiculous failure. And in the second place, to have before one admired objects, and hopes of true satisfaction, is itself a very pleasant and ennobling thing. So if, as I suspect, you are wavering a little in regard to the direction you will start out in, I hope you will think this over; because, as I am not a moralist, nor a minister, nor an old man, nor anyone with a right to preach and give advice, I may possibly have struck the truth. I trust you will not be offended at my writing to you as I do. Gossip and jokes have I not, but that which I have I give you; don’t doubt that I am “with the greatest respect” your sincere friend
George Santayana
P.S. When you see Ward, please give him an affectionate scolding from me.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book One, [1868]-1909. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.