To Charles P. Davis
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.
Versailles, France. July 7, 1932
Alas, a prolonged failure to respond to letters, and to everything else, has an easy explanation at our age. My sister died in February, 1929, after an illness of five days: but, as you know, she had suffered for a long time from some sort of gout or dropsy (we never understood what it was) which made it difficult and painful for her to move. She had also suffered a great deal morally, in the last years, from her husband’s avarice and other crotchets; but she had successfully maintained her American independence in money-matters, and had the consolation of being at last appreciated and even loved by her step-children and their wives and young ones, because she helped them out of the straits in which their father left them, and was the Providence of the whole family, as well as of many other poor people in Avila. Her husband himself died the following year, and my sister Josephine, who had lived with them since 1912, died in October 1930, on St. Theresa’s day. She had, by the way, reconciled herself in a half-conscious way with the Church; her confessor said he thought she had never committed a mortal sin: so that her end was peaceful also, and there were no unpleasant complications in the matter of religious rites. We had also arranged her money-matters nicely . . . and the fact that, spending very little, she had become rather rich, has been a Godsend to us in the “crisis”, since it has helped us practically not to feel the pinch—at least not yet.
My sister Susana’s money went to her husband and his family; and they have since modernized their houses, and even got automobiles—not so common in Avila as in the U.S. Altogether the memory of my sister is sweet to everyone now, although we didn’t make her life particularly sweet to her while she was in this world. I don’t know how frankly she spoke her thoughts to you: but in spite of her religious fervour and experience, she remained always passionately attached to people and circumstances and events in her surroundings. She was full of plans, even at the age of 77, about what she would do when she was free, and could rebuild their house, and make a different will, and get me to come and live with her. I should have done so with pleasure, if she had survived her husband: but human projects are seldom realized－never, perhaps, as we had formed them.
I have sometimes felt an impulse to write to you and learn how things had worked themselves out in your life. . . My own existence is absolutely monotonous. I live only in hotels; work every morning for two or three hours in a dressing-gown: I am worse than an arm-chair philosopher: I am a poet in slippers. In winter, I am in Rome: in summer often in Paris or at Cortina in the Dolomites; and I hardly see anybody. But I have more literary projects than I shall live to execute; I read a lot of beautiful and interesting books, old and new; I take a daily walk in the most approved and quiet places, wherever the priests walk; and I am, Deo gratias, in good health and in easy circumstances.
What more can one desire at seventy? Love? Faith? If I am without faith or love, I am not without a certain amused connivance at the nature of things which keeps me tolerably happy.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Four, 1928–1932. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY.
To Richard Colton Lyon
