Category: LETTERS Page 10 of 274

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. March 11, 1931

Dear Strong

It happens that Lord Russell and I had been exchanging letters during the last fortnight before his death, and this renewal of friendliness at the end softens very much for me the close of an enormously important chapter in my life. On Feb. 14 he wrote: “All that is the real part of me and my very extensive external activities are to me of the nature of Maya, or an illusion. They interest me, they are my —life job, and I do them, but they are not a part of my real life.”

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Mary Whitall Smith Berenson
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. March 10, 1930

Dear Mrs Berenson

What! Do you propose that I should make a visit? It is a delusion of your excessive kindness to imagine that I might still be fit for such things. I am not; because although well enough in appearance, and still going strong in the solitude of my insides, I am deaf physically and intellectually, and incapable of society.

I have so long and so completely renounced all society that I don’t dare to go anywhere, and say nothing when I do.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Villa I Tatti, Settignano, Italy.

To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford. March 9, 1919

My own unhappiness about the war disappeared on July 18, 1918, and indeed in a certain sense had disappeared earlier, because although I thought the Germans might win a nominal victory, the Russian revolution seemed to me to have sealed the fate of the German system and its essential ambitions. . . .

Existence is fundamentally in flux—that is a conviction and expectation to start with; and we are merely resuming the movement, perfectly sensible before the war, which is bringing about the dissolution of the age of luxury and respectability in which you and I were born. Let it dissolve! Of course much horror and injustice will be involved in the process—but much would have been involved also in maintaining the old order.

I am not afraid of the people. It is their leaders that are odious, but they will either succumb and be discredited, or they will become fashionable tyrants and patrons of the arts like all the bosses that have preceded them.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC.

To Horace Meyer Kallen
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. March 8, 1952

Yesterday your friend Loring brought me your letter and “Patterns of Progress” and found me at 11 a.m reading in Lorenzo de’ Medici some musical verses on the diabolical act of Prometheus in bringing fire down to earth with the dreadful consequences of war, trade, and the devouring of cooked carcasses. All fire wills to go heavenward, where according to Aristotle it belongs, and on earth, according to the love-sick Lorenzo, there should be only vegetables and nude Adams and Eves.

I am with you rather than with Lorenzo, not caring at all for love-making in Paradise, but thinking that knowledge both as a means and an end is the best of acquisitions.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To Ezra Loomis Pound
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. March 7, 1940

You and T. S. E. are reformers, full of prophetic zeal and faith in the Advent of the Lord; whereas I am cynically content to let people educate or neglect themselves as they may prefer.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.