Category: LETTERS Page 14 of 274

To Benjamin De Casseres
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. February 19, 1936

Dear Mr. De Casseres

I have read your booklet on Exhibitionism with pleasure, sometimes bursting into a hearty laugh. You have the verve and the transcendental courage of the old American free lances, the Emersons, Thoreaus, Mark Twains, and Walt Whitmans. But is the substance of your doctrine other than the doctrine of Maya?For my part, I agree that we are of imagination all compact, and that our minds clothe or exhibit something else, that alone is active and lasting. You call it ourselves, I call it matter, others call it Brahma. Is there, functionally, any difference?

Yours sincerely G Santayana

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

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Grand Hotel,
Rome. February 18, 1941

I am in a soft mood, partly due to the long siege of my catarrh. I had a relapse and my heart seems to have become feebler; but I had no fever to speak of, even when the cough was at its worst, and later my pulse got down below 60 and my temperature down to 36; Sabbatucci has been attentive. I had a nurse for six nights. She talked a lot (I coughed less when I talked) and complained that there are troppi bambini: she had to work hard to give her two boys a start in life. I have been reading Terence, Latin with an Italian version on the opposite page. Lovely, lovely feeling, to bring tears to the eyes, but not much wit. If Shakespeare had taken up The Adelphi he would have made something exquisite out of it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.

To John Hall Wheelock
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. February 17, 1945

I am now writing this by an open French window in the sun, already springlike here at this season. So that although we are deprived of many old conveniences or luxuries, we are not more uncomfortable than everybody used to be always two hundred years ago. My experience of life in Avila has made the little privations of the war seem quite tolerable.

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 Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. February 16, 1947

We have been having a severe winter with cold rain and little sun since Christmas; but I have kept very well. It is only my work that has suffered because without the sun I felt more like lounging in my chaise longue, well wrapped up, and reading, than like sitting up to write. But there is no hurry about my political book which must last me until my wits give out, as this is the last number in my programme. However, if the lights don’t go out when it is finished, I have an impromptu ready for the audience, who being only future readers, can’t run away visibly. It is a set of afternoon lectures for imaginary ladies on The False Steps of Philosophy: would be better in French: Les Faux Pas de la Philosophie. She began her deviations from the straight path very early, with Socrates, whom I should show not to have been such a sound moralist as he is reputed to be, and really a rogue. After him, I should expose (pleasantly of course) the errors of Saint Paul, in preaching total depravity (while dear Saint John was preaching universal love) and making Christ the Scapegoat instead of the Lamb. Then I should skip to Descartes who misled the whole chorus of modern philosophers, except Spinoza, by making them fall in love with themselves. But all this is a waste of time, because I shall never get to it.

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 Augusto Guzzo
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6,
Rome. February 15, 1948

Dear Professor Guzzo,

Your tremendous book has arrived and I have read the Introduction and the Summary. How I wish that you could have sent me this book fifty years ago, when I was writing my superficial “Life of Reason”. Now it comes at a moment when I am absorbed not in the critical or dramatic elucidation of conscious existence, not in my Self or in a rational conduct of my beliefs or duties, but in the fate of Mankind, conceived or found as a race of animals living in a material world. And as it is too late in my life for me to recast for myself the transcendental problem, or any problem of Existence or knowledge, I don’t dare to drop the train of thought that I am engaged in: “les moments me sont chers”. So I am afraid I shall never do justice to your profound revision of things from within outwards. Except that I know how that problem imposes itself on the self-questioning mind, and how dramatic is the order of evidence, the causa cognoscendi, that reflection can construct by intense criticism. However, I come in my descriptions of “Dominations and Powers” upon distinctions between “vital liberty” and “empty liberty”, between “growth” and “militancy”, between “economic” and “liberal” arts, and many other logical or moral questions; and I shall not forget to consult your pages on these points when I find myself in a difficulty.

The fact that you are at work on so vast and important a system of philosophy, even if the outlines of it all are already clear in your mind, makes me wonder all the more that you should be willing to give your precious time to translations, even with such good help as you count upon; and I am all the more grateful that my book on the Idea of Christ is to profit by that willingness. I suppose during the summer holidays you may like to turn to lighter occupation; and I know how fascinating the search often is, in translating, for a word or phrase that will convey the author’s intention. In any case, I have today signed the contract with the Edizioni Comunità for the Italian edition, in which article 8 runs as follows: “The Publishers undertake to use the translation of the said work made by Professor Augusto Guzzo”.

I hardly find words to tell you how much I appreciate this favour, as well as the gift of your new book.

Yours sincerely

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.