Category: LETTERS Page 15 of 274

To William Cameron Forbes
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
King’s College
Cambridge, England. November 1, 1896

My life here is very pleasant. My rooms are cheerful and well-situated, although my landlady’s aesthetic sense is not what I could wish, and her worsted roses under glass bells—now happily banished—are not what my eyes most love to feast upon. However, life is well-arranged. I dine in Hall at the High Table with the Dons, of whom I see a great deal also at other times. They are for the most part very quiet, cultivated, odd, youngish men. Most people here are shy, but very friendly and unaffected, easier to get on with than Oxford people if perhaps less interesting. As you might guess, I go often to watch the football “matches”. The game as played in England is very pretty, especially the passing while on the run, by which the long gains are usually made. There is no interference—the men run far apart, for the sake of the passing—and, strangest of all, the ball belongs to neither side after a down but is thrown into the middle of a double turtleback formation, and kicked (“heeled”) about until one side or the other succeeds in making it slip out where its backs can pick it up and pass it for a run or kick. The art of tackling is almost unknown but men are hurt all the same. Our game is much more glorious and exciting, but this is very good in its way, and is hard, varied exercise. Every man has frequent chances to kick, and team work tells in the heeling and passing. It’s too bad you didn’t take a more responsible position in coaching this year. You probably have been called on by this time to do more than you expected when you wrote. My own exertions are all directed to Plato at present. I hear two lectures a week and have one hour in private with Jackson of Trinity, who is excellent, most stimulating and enlightening. It’s hard stuff—Parmenides and Philebus—but very interesting to me on account of the deep logical and metaphysical questions involved. My Greek, too, is coming back in a rather reassuring manner, and I hope to be less ignorant in several ways than I was when the year began.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Robert Seymour Bridges
Dover, England. October 31, 1923

My glimpse of England after four years has left me with mixed feelings. I fear my English days are over. Nothing I could now see or feel would be likely to equal the memories I have of other days, which, if not the beaux jours of England, were at least my beaux jours, and which it is almost a pity to overlay with sadder impressions. Oxford is very much itself in spite of obvious crowding, and the flocks of women on bicycles which come round the corners of New College Lane Sunt lacrymae rerum but so mixed with pleasure that all regrets become impertinent.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Bodleian Library, Oxford University, England

To Charles Augustus Strong
60 Brattle St
Cambridge, Massachusetts. [Autumn 1899-June 1904]

I have been reading more Fichte and Hegel, but my inner self rebels increasingly against their empty pertinacity and shocking habit of covering a paradox with a truism, and making you believe the absurd under the guise of the self-evident. So I shall be kindly disposed to the things-in-themselves.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book One, [1868]-1909.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Lauinger Library, Georgetown University, Washington DC

To Andrew Joseph Onderdonk
Hotel Bristol
Rome. Oct. 28, 1936

I have become rather anti-English in my tendencies of late. My British and American affections have always been personal and social rather than political or theoretic: and now that I am at the last lap of life and not counting on the pleasures of friendship, the intellectual muddle, and theoretic meanness of the Anglo-Saxon mind repell me considerably. However, there must be a little of everything in the Lord’s vineyard, as they say in Spain.

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