To Cyril Coniston Clemens
Via Santo Stefano Rotondo, 6
Rome, Dec. 6, 1946
Dear Clemens,
I have been putting off thanking you for “Attlee” until I had read it, but for the first time in my life I am really busy. I am trying to learn something about politics, and have been reading all I can find trustworthy from Aristotle to Stalin, especially now Toynbee’s “A Study of History”, which is to be in 13 volumes of which 9, I believe, are already published. And I have just heard of a book published by the Harvard Univ. Press on “Plato’s Theory of Man”, which to judge by the review in The Times Lit. Supplement is excellent. The author, whom I had never heard of, is John Wild. Is he a professor somewhere or–happy man?–a free lance? Your “Attlee”, like your “Truman” will fall in well in my re-education, but I am too deep at the moment in the migrations of Nomads and the decay of prehistoric civilizations to read about the present, which seems not itself to know what on earth it is.
With best wishes for the New Year,
Yours sincerely.
G Santayana
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Seven, 1941-1947. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006.
Location of manuscript: William R. Perkins Library, Duke University, Durham NC