To George Sturgis
Hotel Bristol
Rome. December 9, 1929
Please observe . . . my protest and disproof of all you say about my books being unintelligible. Of course, if you choose the wrong passages, and don’t know the vocabulary nor the context, you may sometimes feel a certain cerebral emptiness for a moment: but that would happen if you were reading an infantile writer like Miss Gertrude Stein, and it happens to me when I read newspaper headings. That my books are pellucid is no boast of my own. Here is what Professor Whitehead says of them in his last book, arrived this morning. “He [that is, me] is only distinguished [from other great philosophers] by his clarity of thought—a characteristic which he shares with the men of genius of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries”. . . . I blush, but I quote, because I don’t want you to lose any more money betting that I can’t be made out.
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