'Despair Before Us, Vanity Behind'

It’s a comfort to know that even the wisest among us are not immune to vanity. On this date, April 12, in 1940, George Santayana is staying at the Hotel Danieli in Venice, working on his memoir, Persons and Places, which will be published in 1944. He interrupts his work to reply to what his critics have written in The Philosophy of George Santayana (1940), edited by Paul Arthur Schilpp. Schlipp has asked him to supply a photograph “as informal as possible.” Can one imagine Santayana, then seventy-six years old, in shorts and a baseball cap worn backwards? In a letter to his friend the American poet John Hall Wheelock he writes:

“If [the photo] is at all good, I will send you a copy. I wish you could think of something more spiritual and less psychical for the frontispiece of your Triton volume [a fifteen-volume set of Santayana’s work published in 1936]. There are too many portraits, and not very good ones, in that edition; but you might like a new photograph for general advertisement. I will try to look as much like Gandhi as I can, as to the forehead: but I am afraid the figure may rather resemble Chesterton.” (The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937–1940, MIT Press, 2004.)

Santayana’s poetry tends to be rather high-caloric, rich in saturated fats. Sonnet XXV, among his better ones, closes with this:

“Such is youth;

Till from that summer’s trance we wake, to find

Despair before us, vanity behind.”