Category: LETTERS Page 52 of 274

To Rosamond Thomas [Sturgis] Little
Rome. July 22, 1952.

Dear Rosamond,

Your 4 parcels of rice-cereals arrived today, just when my supply was about to fail. Thank you very much.

You will perceive by this short letter that something else is beginning to fail me, namely my eyes, and reading is even harder than writing, so that it will be hard for me to do anything but compose old-fashioned verses.

It had already been enthusiasm for a poem of Lorenzo de’ Medici that had overtaxed my eyesight in making alternative English version of it. At least I have something to balance my imprudence in 23 stanzas in octava rima, making a complete partly original work: my last! For everyone tells me, that I am almost dead. It is more than tolerable, in spite of the heat.

I must stop scrawling, although I have various other things that I should like to tell you.

Yours affectionately,
G Santayana

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 Henry Ward Abbot
Hotel Miramonti
Cortina d’Ampezzo, Italy. July 21, 1933

Dear Harry,

Your impatience is most flattering, and I am asking the English publisher of the Locke lecture to send you a copy. Scribner seems not to have brought out the American edition yet, I suppose waiting for good times to return. The English edition appeared in May.

As to the Spinoza paper, I am myself a trifle annoyed. Nijhoff, at The Hague, was to have issued the Septimana Spinozana (in which my paper appears) last November, then in January, then in the spring, and now in the autumn. I have not received any explanation, but probably the multitude of languages and of contributors have made a Babel of the editor’s mind, who was not well to begin with.

All this comes, not of my being mad à enfermer, but only weak enough to have accepted invitations to waste my sweetness in the lectureroom air, and surrender my MS to third parties. It won’t happen again.

It is most entertaining living in these times. This Roosevelt is more Caesarian than the spluttering Theodore; we are having Fascism under another name rising in France, in Germany, and in the U.S.! And the English Church—what a comedy that is too! I enjoy it immensely.

Yours sincerely, 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.

To Richard Edmund Butler
Rome. July 20, 1952

Dear Father Butler

I do not think you have learned any thing from reading my books; you have read the words and perhaps thought what Saint Thomas might have said about it. This would do nicely for passing an examination; but it would not enlarge your mind: This is confirmed by your saying that “Soliloquies” is (verbally) the best of my books all of them being mere attempts to defend “Interpretations”. It is true that, as to religion, this book had struck the keynote. But as to “reason” and “ideas” all is changed in “Soliloquies”.

G.S.

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Eight, 1948-1952.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2008.
Location of manuscript: Provincial Archives, Province of St. Albert the Great, Chicago IL.

To Ezra Loomis Pound
Via S. Stefano Rotondo 6
Rome. July 19, 1946

Dear E. P.

I am glad to hear directly from you. What people told me when I inquired was meagre and contradictory. Now that I have your address I can ask Scribner to send you my new book, or any other obtainable book that you may want. In an anthology sent me I find your ballad about Christ quà gangster: it is a nice contrast to my new book on the idea of Christ as pure spirit in the flesh. Mine would perhaps turn your stomach, yours only makes me laugh.

My copy of the Realm of Spirit has not been returned, or was lost on the way, but now it doesn’t at all matter because I have another version in the big single edition of Realms of Being that Scribner has issued and which is a success both as an imposing volume and as a means of diffusing my speculations, now precisely when so much romantic nonsense has lost the hypnotic power.

I hope your health and prospects of returning to Italy are improving.

Yours sincerely,
G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Seven, 1941-1947.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: Unknown.

To George Sturgis
9, Avenue de l’Observatoire
Paris. July 18, 1927

Dear George,

I have your letter of July 6, and a previous one also, and have seen with pleasure that all goes well with you. As for me, I am as usual. I arrived after the excitement about Lindberg; found Strong here, who left for Switzerland not long after; and later Margaret Strong has been here, but we lead a strange life together in this apartment, hardly ever seeing each other. I believe she is moving into her new house at Saint Germain in a day or two, but her ways, like the Lord’s, are past finding out. Don’t think I say this in any spirit of complaint: she gives me no trouble, and supplies me with food and service, which I don’t pay for when she is here; but she hides in an odd way; it is suspected that she is secretly engaged to be married, and altogether she is a puzzle to her friends.

. . .

A German friend dines with me (at restaurants) every evening: he is a friend of my friend Baron Westenholz of Hamburg, and my guest in Paris, although I had to get a room for him at a hotel near by, as I couldn’t put him up in the apartment, occupied by Margaret, her dog, her maid, and sundry bales and heaps of carpets, stuffs, blankets, antique furniture, and bandboxes in ever corner, on all the chairs, and behind every door. My own room, I need hardly say, is sacred, and I live happy in it, like a monk in his cell.

It is decided that I shall not go to Avila this summer. Your aunt Susie and Celedonio wrote giving me a formal invitation—too formal, perhaps—but it seemed to me safer not to accept it, as it was at least possible that I should have been in their way and given them too much trouble. This decision leaves me free to remain here quietly until the middle of October when I shall doubtless return to Italy, either directly to Rome, or stopping on the way to pay a visit to Strong at Fiesole. Love to all from

G Santayana

From The Letters of George Santayana:  Book Three, 1921-1927.  Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2002.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA.