To Nancy Saunders Toy
7 Park Place, St. James’s
London. September 23, 1932
Dear Mrs. Toy,
You find me—or rather I find myself—once more in England after nine years’ absence, and with strangely little emotion, pleasurable or otherwise. London is very much as it always was: a few Babilonian white buildings, and a little more motor traffic, is all that distinguishes it materially from what it was, even forty or fifty years ago. Morally and socially no doubt there has been a revolution; but I never knew London society, and now I don’t know a single Londoner; so that I am not much troubled by the change. I mean, I don’t know a single Londoner of those I see in the street: I might perhaps hunt up one or two old acquaintances; but I am little tempted to do so; I am sufficiently occupied with finishing my Locke lecture, reading various things that turn up, and walking in Hyde Park, which seems greener and grander than ever.
. . . .
The Domus Spinozana at The Hague is very pleasing, with an open door from the large room, occupying the whole ground floor, into a small garden, and upstairs, under the sloping rafters of the roof, the nook where the philosopher slept and died. They have collected a few books and M.S. belonging to him, but the furniture is rapportée. The meetings were like all meetings and international conferences, rather tiresome and futile. My own lecture was kindly received and apparently rather well understood by the polyglot audience; and my eloquence transported at least one, and the most distinguished, of my audience, Sir Frederick Pollack, aged 92, into Nirvana, for (it being after dinner) he slept peacefully through the whole. . . .
G Santayana
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