To Boylston Adams Beal
Hotel Bristol
Rome. March 20, 1938
The heart is the spot where weakness is most becoming; you die from the centre and your…decline is a kind of self-surrender. I should be glad to die of the heart.
It happens that at this moment I am reading for the first time Henry Adam’s Chartres and Mont Saint Michell . . . I see in his book that, in spite of communicating a good deal of learning, he frankly falls back exclusively on emotion, with the very American feeling that all ideas are more or less jokes and that only the heart matters, that heart from which it is so easy and almost pleasant to die.
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: The Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge MA