Category: LETTERS Page 154 of 274

To Boylston Adams Beal
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 20, 1938

The heart is the spot where weakness is most becoming; you die from the centre and your…decline is a kind of self-surrender. I should be glad to die of the heart.

It happens that at this moment I am reading for the first time Henry Adam’s Chartres and Mont Saint Michell . . . I see in his book that, in spite of communicating a good deal of learning, he frankly falls back exclusively on emotion, with the very American feeling that all ideas are more or less jokes and that only the heart matters, that heart from which it is so easy and almost pleasant to die.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 19, 1926

Do you suppose that there is any wonderful secret in Relativity, apart from mathematical calculations, which is beyond the understanding of the most willing mind? I doubt it: but of course we have to be silent until one of the Fach lets the cat out of the bag; it is the new system under which we live, the Soviet system, where a self-appointed committee of experts tell the world what it is expected to believe under pain of excommunication.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY

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care to discriminate history from poetry: good history is unintentionally poetical, and poetry is inevitably a capital historical document concerning the poet’s mind.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 Charles Augustus Strong
Colonial Club
Cambridge, Massachusetts. March 16, 1910

Boutroux is here, giving us delightful talks, full of simplicity and finesse, but tending, I am afraid, to merely rhetorical and sentimental conclusions. He is the Parisian Palmer, or the Longfellow of philosophy.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY