Category: LETTERS Page 32 of 274

Letters in Limbo ~ October 30, 1923

On October 30, 2024

To Gilbert Seldes
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London
Oxford, England. October 30, 1923

Dear Mr Seldes,

I have read Bertrand Russell’s book, but hardly care to revert to it or to write a review. My ideas of politics are so contrary to his that it would be hard for me say anything that didn’t seem ill-natured about his strange madness whenever he touches any human subject. Besides, I think I have already written too much about him.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Three, 1921-1927. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY

Letters in Limbo ~ [Autumn 1899 – June 1904]

By David Spiech

On October 29, 2024

In LETTERS

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

Letters in Limbo ~ October 28, 1936

By David Spiech

On October 28, 2024

In LETTERS

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

Letters in Limbo ~ [Late 1913]

By David Spiech

On October 27, 2024

In LETTERS

To Polly Winslow
Ávila, Spain. [Late 1913]

. . . For to do great things with pea-green half-moons on a zebra skin, it is perhaps necessary not to know too much as yet about that dreadful thing which grown-up people call the world. The world is a very imperious, absorbing, jealous master: and the Kingdom of Post-Impressionist art is not of this world.

Dear me, Polly, I have written you a very long letter; but as you have now reached a literary age, you won’t mind how long it takes you to read it. The worst of it is I haven’t said any of the things that I meant to say, such as to thank you for writing, and to thank your Mamma for the photos, and say the one of little Fred with you standing behind is the one that reminds me most of him in his crib, when he looked so much like the little Child in a crib which we see every where (at least in this Christian country) on Christmas Day. The others of him, and all yours, don’t seem to me good enough to be memories, and of course they are not very important as absolute forms in absolute colours which is the only “art” Mr. Roger Frye now allows me to like.

I am very very cold in this southern climate, and am going farther south still (very illogically) to see if that will mend matters. I am going to a romantic thriftless old city called Seville, to see if (having past fifty) I can still write poetry and fall in love. You don’t think that is very likely, I know, and can almost see you laughing at me. The fact is I don’t think it very likely myself; but it is sometimes amusing to expose oneself to the dangers from which one is perfectly safe.

If I find any Post Impressionist pictures in Seville I will send you one to see if you can be converted too.

From your affectionate

Spanish Uncle.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Two, 1910-1920. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

Letters in Limbo ~ October 26, 1934

By David Spiech

On October 26, 2024

In LETTERS

To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Bristol
Rome. October 26, 1934.

Dear Cory,

There is a marked change of tone in your letters, of Oct. 5 and 24, about Eliot’s proposal. Has something happened to change your view? Perhaps I ought to have acknowledged your first letter at once, but I was in the act of leaving Venice and settling down here, and I left it on purpose until I should write in any case at the end of the month. It doesn’t seem to me that Eliot was impertinent or is generally an ass. He is prim, as he himself has said; and it is probably quite true that I am ignored by the English critics, especially on the philosophical side, and quite intelligibly. I am a back number, partly in age, partly in manner. Philosophers now are expected to be thoroughly confused in general, and very scholastic in detail. This doesn’t matter: and I think it just as well that you shouldn’t trouble about introducing, or re-introducing my later philosophy to the public for the present. In ten years, or when the wind changes, will be time enough. But we oughtn’t to be rude to Eliot: and I will reply to his letter myself, and perhaps send him one of my Dominations & Powers articles.

. . . .

Poor Strong is laid up with a sore bottom, from too much sitting on it. I tell him this may be a blessing in disguise, if it accustoms him to lie down more. Flatness is as delicious physically as it is odious mentally.

Yours affly,
G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Five, 1933-1936. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY