To Henry Ward Abbot
C/o Brown Shipley & Co
123 Pall Mall, London, S.W.1
Rome, Jan. 16, 1924.
I have never been anything but utterly bored and digusted with the public world, the world of business, politics, family, and society. It was only the glimmer of sport, humour, friendship, or love falling over it that made it tolerable. In the last ten years, in spite of the war, I have been able to keep out of that insufferable medium, and have consequently been much happier. Here in Rome, for instance, the world is pleasing: it seems always to have cared for things worth having; it is congenitally beautiful, born to enjoy itself humanly, and straightforward in its villainies and its sorrows. I walk about, knowing no one and speaking to nobody, and I feel that everybody understands me; and what is more and greater, that everybody is at work for the sake of the very things I am inwardly at work about, human liberty and pleasantness breaking through the mesh of circumstances and laughing at it. The political atmosphere here is good also: I am in great hopes in respect to the Latin world: the German and Anglosaxon shams have been discredited–representative government, for instance–and people are daring to be themselves. The church too is a good thing–much better than–“science”,–and a part of the game.
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