Category: LETTERS Page 5 of 274

To Justus Buchler and Benjamin P. Schwartz
Hotel Danieli,
Venice. March 13, 1940

The winter here, as elsewhere, has been extraordinarily severe: six snow-storms, continual fog, and occasional biting winds from Finnland. Now that peace seems to be returning at least there, we may hope for more balmy weather.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Six, 1937-1940.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Brooklyn College Library, Brooklyn NY.

To Nancy Saunders Toy
Rome. March 12, 1932

I have just read Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, on top of Benda’s disparaging view of all worlds, old and new. There seems to be a general change of tone, among the modern school, from the optimism of our time. It is not our old pessimism, either, but a sort of horror of mechanism, which I don’t feel, perhaps because I have always believed that the universe is mechanical, and that nevertheless the spirit can be, I won’t say at home in it, but supported by it.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To Charles Augustus Strong
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. March 11, 1931

Dear Strong

It happens that Lord Russell and I had been exchanging letters during the last fortnight before his death, and this renewal of friendliness at the end softens very much for me the close of an enormously important chapter in my life. On Feb. 14 he wrote: “All that is the real part of me and my very extensive external activities are to me of the nature of Maya, or an illusion. They interest me, they are my —life job, and I do them, but they are not a part of my real life.”

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow NY.

To Mary Whitall Smith Berenson
Hotel Bristol,
Rome. March 10, 1930

Dear Mrs Berenson

What! Do you propose that I should make a visit? It is a delusion of your excessive kindness to imagine that I might still be fit for such things. I am not; because although well enough in appearance, and still going strong in the solitude of my insides, I am deaf physically and intellectually, and incapable of society.

I have so long and so completely renounced all society that I don’t dare to go anywhere, and say nothing when I do.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Four, 1928-1932.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Villa I Tatti, Settignano, Italy.

To Logan Pearsall Smith
22 Beaumont Street
Oxford. March 9, 1919

My own unhappiness about the war disappeared on July 18, 1918, and indeed in a certain sense had disappeared earlier, because although I thought the Germans might win a nominal victory, the Russian revolution seemed to me to have sealed the fate of the German system and its essential ambitions. . . .

Existence is fundamentally in flux—that is a conviction and expectation to start with; and we are merely resuming the movement, perfectly sensible before the war, which is bringing about the dissolution of the age of luxury and respectability in which you and I were born. Let it dissolve! Of course much horror and injustice will be involved in the process—but much would have been involved also in maintaining the old order.

I am not afraid of the people. It is their leaders that are odious, but they will either succumb and be discredited, or they will become fashionable tyrants and patrons of the arts like all the bosses that have preceded them.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Two, 1910-1920.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001.
Location of manuscript: The Library of Congress, Washington DC.