Category: LETTERS Page 50 of 274

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. August 1, 1949

As to Angst my quarrel with it is temperamental and you must not take it seriously. The reality is what Schopenhauer calls the Will, the Will to Live. It makes the child anxious to get the breast or the bottle, the lover his girl, the workman his Saturday-night wages, and the invalid to get well. You can’t help caring. But these natural cravings and fears are occasional, they can be modified or placated, you may “care” about something else, Latin poetry, for instance, which carries no Angst with it, though it is rich in interest and in reassuring knowledge of life. What I dislike about calling Will Angst is the suggestion that it is mysterious and non-natural. It is fundamental but can be appeased. It need not end in Collapse but may be transcended throughout by charity and reason. The existentialists’ reaction against inhuman philosophy and politics is healthy, but they do not seem healthy themselves. And egotism is not cured by becoming personal. It is simply made easier to practise. It is naturally prevalent and won’t cause any wars or totalitarian tyrannies. Meno male!

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.

To John Hall Wheelock
C/o Brown Shipley & Co.
123, Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Paris. July 31, 1936

As to the illustrations, I am sorry to be helpless. I had a very nice little photo of myself at 18, my graduating school portrait, but somehow I have lost it. Possibly George Sturgis or his wife asked me for it when they were in Rome years ago. In that case he may be able to let you have it. Or the Latin School people in Boston: although I doubt that they collect photographs of their old boys. It was the class of 1882.

There was also a family group taken a year or two later in which I had rather long hair and little whiskers—bad form, but characteristic of the time before I had become a commonplace Harvard man. Otherwise, I don’t remember any picture of me in “early youth”.

The Denman Ross portrait is not a good likeness, but I am pilloried in it for all future time in Emerson Hall, and as it has a beard it will seem more like me to my old pupils between 1906–1912. All the rest of my life I have worn only a mustache.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Five, 1933-1936.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2003.
Location of manuscript: Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Libraries, Princeton NJ.

To [Henry Ward Abbot]
[Rome or Paris] [Summer 1932]

. . . pessimism, questionings about a future life, or the desirability of death. Somehow I seem not to feel the edge of those uncertainties, as I did fifty years ago: but, more objectively considered, the moral anarchy of the world is no less interesting. I am reading an excellent book by Papini, “Gog”: the Catholics seem now to be the best critics: Maritain, Papini, T. S. Eliot (an amateur Catholic): it is not their faith that makes them clear-sighted, but their remoteness from the delusions of the age. In America, Edmund Wilson seems rather good: but he is academic; has learned his authors.

I have been rereading John Locke, for a lecture I am to give in Bloomsbury in October: a bit prosy, and speculatively poor, but pungent and genuine in his common sense.

You keep asking about my novel: it is not finished, perhaps never will be, and is not likely to be published in my life-time. Don’t think of it. I will send you my lectures on Spinoza and Locke when they are printed— my last appearances in public!

Your old friend, G.S.

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 Ezra Loomis Pound
Clinica della Piccola Compagnia di Maria
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. July 29, 1942

In reading the R[ealm] of Spirit (if you go on with it) please keep in mind that I don’t believe anything existent can be defined, only indicated; so that all sorts of different fingers or words pointed at it are better than any one name. So when I say “form of life”, the expression is casual and might have been “kind of life”, or “zone”, as you suggest. I meant merely that life in places issues in spirit, and that spirit is not an independent substance or centre with a persistent individuality: only a spark of light.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University, New Haven CT.

To Richard Colton Lyon
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome. July 28, 1950

Dear Dick,

You end your long letter, just received, with a pleasing suggestion (as ladies used to do in postscripts) which I mustn’t leave unnoticed. I didn’t send you Cardiff’s book because I was disgusted with it and have not sent it to anybody, not even to Cory.* When he sent me half a dozen pages, I smelt a rat at once, but didn’t wish to discourage him, because the project of a selection of maxims or thoughts or epigrams had always tempted my vanity, to show the water-lilies that might be picked in the stagnant pools of philosophy. But I told him that I felt that his selections, though good, were not diversified enough: too much commonplace rationalism (when I am not a rationalist) and not enough cynicism or scepticism or psychological malice: and I gave him a sample of what I wished he would include, what Mario says about our “having to change the truth a little in order to remember it”. When the book arrived I saw that the old rascal had left that out! He also represented me as merely renovating Tom Paine, instead of Thomas Aquinas! Cheap and witless criticism of religion, without all the pages of sympathetic treatment of it, for instance in “The Idea of Christ in the Gospels”. I was furious; but in time, and on looking at other parts of the book, I have reconciled myself to it somewhat. But I am delighted to hear that you have had that project in mind, for some distant future entertainment. And you, who before you had seen me, chose that passage at the end of the Dialogue on Normal Madness, may be relied on not to miss the strong and really radical things. And that egregious Cardiff actually quotes the last few words, which seem, alone, a melodramatic piece of verbiage, when it is all the profound philosophy (not mere physics) of Democritus when it comes after the picture of Alcibiades winning the chariot-race at Olympia and his dismay at thinking it all dissolved into atoms. Weep, my son, if you are human, but laugh also, if you are a man.

This might lead me back to the body of your letter and the question of the moral sense. But I don’t feel like going into it. I read lately in the Times Literary Supplement a review of a Scottish philosopher who maintains the mysterious absoluteness of what is “right” as distinguished from what is naturally good. I have always wondered at the aura that hangs about the word “duty”. It means only owed. If you have pledged yourself to pay something you are bound in honour to pay it—if you can. The propriety of this conduct is obvious; but the mystic awe that hangs about “you ought” is superstitious.—Very glad you are deep in French. Tell me what you are reading.

Yours, G Santayana

*. Cory understands most of my philosophy very well; but he doesn’t want to pledge himself to it, where English academic opinion disapproves; so that sometimes he allows himself unbecoming language.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.