Category: LETTERS Page 11 of 274

To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123,
Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 6, 1934

It is also interesting to hear of the cheap edition of “Character & Opinion in the U.S,” to be brought out by the W. W. Norton company. I have always defied pirates, like an elderly female only too willing to be ravished; and it is more than one could expect to find the poacher at last paying for his pickings.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Corliss Lamont
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 5, 1935

The subject of immortality has long ceased to be a living issue with me; and though I know that some people agonize about it, I am confirmed in my old impression that this is a verbal or mythical obsession of the human mind, rather than a literal belief. Everything, in myth and religion must be understood with a difference, in a Pickwickian sense, if we are to understand it truly, and not to import an unnatural fanaticism into the play of poetic fancy. . . .

Orthodox heavens are peaceful: souls are not supposed to change and pass through new risks and adventures: they merely possess, as in Dante, the truth of their earthly careers and of their religious attainment. In other words, souls in heaven are mythical impersonations of the truth or totality of those persons’ earthly life.

. . . this life, and anything truly living, is something dramatic, groping, planning, excited, and exciting. It is dangerous: and Nietsche needn’t have told us to live perilously: it would have been enough to tell us to live.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To Charles Scribner Jr.
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 4, 1930

Thank you very much for your letter (of Feb. 21) and the cheque enclosed, from which I gather that some ladies’ college continues to use my early works as textbooks.

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.

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. March 3, 1947

I am also reading a life of Einstein that the publishers have sent me, asking for a review, or at least a “puff”, but it arrived too late for that purpose. I find it absorbing, although translated from ponderous German into bad English. However, through the fog of words I seem to catch the faint light of very distant stars, and that is exhilarating.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript:Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To Sidney Hook
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Rome. March 2, 1937

Dear Mr. Hook

You express my entire conviction when you say that philosophical detachment does not signify political indifference. I happen to have lived in isolation from affairs, on account of hardly ever being in my own country or feeling any vital affinity to modern movements; but a man might recognize the relativity of morals and of human nature itself without surrendering any part of his loyalty to his own self or family or nation. On the contrary, nature and truth give us carte blanche in such matters, and every encouragement to play our particular part. . . . although as a philosopher I am sympathetically interested in the Russian experiment, and feel the radical justification of it ideally (as monastic life is also justified), as a man my associations are in the opposite camp.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Morris Library, Southern Illinois University at Carbondale.