“Naturally the mind suffers when it hears talk of so many horrors, but at my age, knowing that I am useless, I find solace in my books and my philosophy, as though it were a matter of ancient history. Besides, everything that is happening in the world is out of the ordinary.”
George Santayana was by
nature a spectator, not a participant. He likely never knew the urge to revel
in the role of activist and was content to remain an observer. “Not that
Santayana had to cultivate detachment,” writes Joseph Epstein; “he seems to
have been born with it, the way other people are born with, say, large feet.”
The philosopher’s stance irritates those who confuse the roles of thinkers and
doers, and automatically distrust the former. The letter quoted above was
written on this date, August 13, in 1943, to his nephew, José Sastre González.
Since July 19, the Allies had been conducting bombing raids on Rome, where
Santayana had lived since 1941 in the Hospital and Convent of the Blue Nuns of
the Little Company of Mary. He was seventy-nine.
During that first raid, five-hundred American bombers had dropped
1,168 tons of bombs on the city. Santayana reassures his nephew: “If a bomb
should fall here it would be by chance and I do believe that we will come out
of the war unharmed.” On the day Santayana is writing, more than three-hundred Allied
aircraft dropped bombs on the city, killing more than three-hundred civilians.
More than 60,000 tons of bombs were eventually dropped on Rome before it was captured by Americans
forces the following summer.
Born in 1921, Private Richard
Wilbur served in World War II as an Army cryptographer with the 36th Texas
Division. He participated in the landing on the Anzio beachhead and entered
Rome on June 5, 1944, the day Mark Clark’s Fifth Army captured the city. The
36th took part in combat longer than any other division during the European
campaign. Wilbur was already writing poems, and Italy remained a recurrent
setting in his work.
On June 3, just south of
Rome, a corporal in Wilbur’s division, Lloyd Tywater, was killed by German
machine gunners a thousand yards from where Wilbur and others were laying wire
to the 36th’s advance command post. Tywater, 27, of Burleson, Texas,
had once been a rodeo rider. Wilbur soon wrote an elegy, “Tywater,” included
in his first collection, The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947).
It concludes:
“And what to say of him,
God knows.
Such violence. And such
repose.”
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