Category: LETTERS Page 11 of 274

To Mary Williams Winslow
C/o Brown Shipley & Co. 123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Nice. March 19, 1923

As to politics, I watch what happens mainly with an eye to discerning, if possible, whether the great international socialistic revolution is coming or not. Russia and Italy now make me incline to believe that the cataclysm will not occur, and that things will go on very much as usual, with a change of personnel and of catch-words. Fascism is the most significant thing now: I wonder if in England the decent people will not eventually organize and arm against the politicians and restore the nation.

Much of what people complain of in the world after the war does not worry me; on the contrary, if only the “industrial situation” could remain always bad, and the population could diminish, especially in the manufacturing towns, I should think it a good thing. There are now too many people, too many things, and too many conferences and elections.

I have been reading a new book of Freud’s and other things by his disciples. They are settling down to a steadier pace, and reducing their paradoxes to very much what everybody has always known.

Einstein I do not attempt to read: I am willing to have a maximum of “relativity”; but I wonder if they have ever considered that if “relative” systems have no connexion and no common object, each is absolute; and if they have a common object, or form a connected group of perspectives, then they are only relative views, like optical illusions, and the universe is not ambiguous in its true form.

When I was ill with the grippe (which is what I am supposed to have had) the doctor, I think, gave me some “dope” or other: any how my imagination was very active and I scribbled in pencil four chapters of my novel, including the end: but I have not dared to reread them, for fear they may be pure nonsense.

People never believe in volcanoes until the lava actually overtakes them.

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.

To George Sturgis
Grand Hotel,
Rome. March 18, 1941

A lot of building and pulling down and park-making is going on in Rome. There is a perfect desert in front of St. Peter’s, and here from my windows I see them working desultorily on the new park round the Baths of Dioclesian and the great new Station. No thought, apparently, of earthquakes or bombs.

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 John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo
Rome. March 17, 1945

At bottom, I don’t much care to discriminate history from poetry: good history is unintentionally poetical, and poetry is inevitably a capital. historical document concerning the poet’s mind.

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 William Lyon Phelps
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. March 16, 1936

An important element in the tragedy of Oliver (not in his personality, for he was no poet) is drawn from the fate of a whole string of Harvard poets in the 1880’s and 1890’s—Sanborn, Philip Savage, Hugh McCullough, Trumbull Stickney, and Cabot Lodge: also Moody, although he lived a little longer and made some impression, I believe, as a playwright. Now all those friends of mine, Stickney especially, of whom I was very fond, were visibly killed by the lack of air to breathe. People individually were kind and appreciative to them, as they were to me: but the system was deadly, and they hadn’t any alternative tradition (as I had) to fall back upon: and of course, as I believe I said of Oliver in my letter, they hadn’t the strength of a great intellectual hero who can stand alone.

I have been trying to think whether I have ever known any “good” people such as are not to be found in my novel. You will say “There’s me and Anabel: why didn’t you put us into your book, to brighten it up a little?” Ah, you are not novelesque enough: and I can’t remember anybody so terribly good in Dickens except the Cheerybell Brothers, and really, if I had put anyone like that in they would have said I was “vicious”, as they say I am in depicting Mrs. Alden.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. March 15, 1946

I wish we had a medical thermometre for style, so that I could take my literary temperature when I sit down to write, and be reassured when it indicated blood heat, or average rationality, and be warned off and take a rest or a glass of something strong if it indicated dangerous fever, involving bad language, or vitality lower than 36° threatening platitudes and imbecility. Yet in the absence of scientific diagnosis it is a resource to take some good coffee which will probably do good; or at least make foolishness unconscious.

I didn’t skip a single page of the Harvard book, remembering that you believe firmly in education and not, like me, in inspiration or drink—and I wanted to inform myself a little on that important subject. Frankly, I thought it a dull book, and full of needless repetition; but at least I was relieved to find that “general” education did not mean education in general (Kindergardens being excluded) but meant what I should call essential education, or learning the things that are most worth knowing, not for their utility in making a living, but in giving us something to reward us for being alive.

There is an orthodox system of life and thought, called apparently “democracy” which must be made the basis and criterion of right education and right character. This is new to me in America. In my time Harvard wasn’t at all inspired in that way. Not that anyone was hostile to democracy, but that we thought enlightenment lay in seeing it, and all other things, in the light of their universal relations, so as to understand them truly, and then on the basis of the widest possible knowledge, to make the best of the facts and opportunities immediately around us. But now education is to be inspired by revealed knowledge of the vocation of man, and faith in our own apostolic mission. Perhaps the war has made this view more prevalent than it would have been in uninterrupted peace.

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.