Category: LETTERS Page 177 of 274

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo
Rome. November 26, 1945

Two more parcels from you have arrived almost together, one with the most desirable sweater (which I should call a wollen waistcoat) and thick wollen socks, and the other with S. S. Pierce’s regulation ideal groceries for all normal persons.1 I have already had the coffee and the tea, although the festive fruit cake is still holding out bravely: which is the sort of over-lapping of good things that Goethe used to value so much in his love-affairs, saying that he liked to see the moon rise while the sun was still shining. That is certainly a comfort to the stomach, although I should think it might be embarrassing for the heart.

Army men have almost stopped coming to have their books autographed: I suppose they are leaving these parts for home, or at least for Germany. But there is a Mr. Gowen at Mr. Myron Taylor’s office who brings notabilities to see me, I don’t know why, except that people who are used to being busy need to be doing something or other when they have nothing to do. Last week he brought Monsieur et Madame Maritain; he is a Catholic philosopher now Ambassodor from France to the Pope; and this week he has brought the Marchesa Marconi,4 a distinctly beautiful woman, not in her first youth, but we may say in her second, since she is a widow. That, however, cannot be the reason why she should come to see me at my age, and there was really nothing that we could talk about with a real interest. But she was very amiable, and so tall—a good deal taller than I—that I couldn’t help being impressed and ashamed of myself for not being younger, taller, and more a man of the world.

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 Dorothy Shakespear Pound
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 24, 1946

I have much appreciated your husband’s letter telling me that p. 6 of my book had reconciled him to the frivolity of the rest. I know he is very selective and “subjective”; and a ray of mutual understanding is of value with such a person. I have also received his new Canto, and should have written to him about it if a ray of light from it had been able to pierce my thick skull. But really I can’t catch the drift of his allusions.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington

To Rosamond Thomas Bennett Sturgis
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. November 23, 1946

A magnificent bouquet arrived from you this morning, intended for Christmas. It serves just as well now, and I am sure that your good wishes are not confined to feast days any more than my leisure. Every day is a holiday and a birthday and a possible last day for a philosopher.

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 Amy Maud Bodkin
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome. November 22, 1934

Dear Madam,

It was very kind of you to send me your book, and you would be surprised if you knew the feeling of strangeness, as if I had forgotten my way about, with which I have read it. Not that you are not perfectly lucid, everywhere delicately perceptive and sympathetic, yet wonderfully sober, in your judgements. But you move in an enchanted world which I am afraid I never inhabited, even when I was young and felt more at home in poetry than I do now. You make me feel afresh that I was never a poet; or rather, to speak with entire frankness, that my sense for poetry has always been immersed in rhetoric, playing on the surface with rhyme, rhythm, assonance, and expressible sentiment, but grossly unaware of these haunting images and profound “experiences” of which you speak. So much so, that even after reading your book with extreme attention and a desire to understand, I am not yet sure what these archetypal patterns are: I mean, what they are ontologically. Everything in my old-fashioned mind seems to be covered by what was called “human nature” and “the passions”. We are all much alike in our capacities for feeling, as in our bodily structure. The doctors find, almost always, every organic detail in each of us exactly in its allotted place; and so the various sensuous phenomena that strike the imagination are bathed in each of us in exactly similar emotions. Do you think that these phenomena owe their power to the fact that they have occurred before in the experience of our ancestors? Do they operate telepathetically from one instance to another? I suspect that our historical knowledge now-a-days sophisticates our passions. When I hear the words: fidelium animæ per Dei misericordiam requiescant in pace, the magic of the chant lies no doubt in the universal (occasional) longing of mortal creatures to return to their mothers’ bosom or to that of Abraham but I may cloud or complicate that human emotion with a touch of the pathos of distance, at the thought that the same plaintive cry may have reechoed long ago in the catacombs. But this effect seems to me adventitious and unnecessary.

I mention these doubts only as a proof of the intense interest with which I have followed your analysis.

Yours sincerely,

G Santayana

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