Gorgeousness

George Santayana comments on a soldier

In 1944 George Santayana was 81.  He had been living in Europe since 1912, chiefly in France and Italy.  He had retired into the care of the Blue Nuns of the Little Company of Mary in Rome in 1941.  The Irish sisters took him in and he stayed with them until his death in 1952.  By 1944 the Allies, chiefly American, Canadian, and British forces, had fought their way 'up the boot' and liberated half the country from Mussolini.

He was able to weather the strains of fascism by keeping his Spanish passport and, although being raised in the United States, never taking citizenship.  He was surprisingly accepting of the Blackshirts.  By the war years he enjoyed literary fame and was comfortably well off due to his novel The Last Puritan.  He never married, but kept company with many gay and bisexual friends. In one allusion to his nature, after a discussion about A.E. Housman and his poetry, he said that "I must have been that way in my Harvard days - although I was unconscious of it at the time .."

Santayana at Harvard, 1886

With the triumphant ride into Rome by General Mark Clark and his Fifth Army, Benito Mussolini and his mistress Claretta Petacci fled north to Milan. Four weeks after the liberation of the city, Santayana was corresponding with George Sturgis and commented on a young Allied soldier who had found his way to the convent - and to the old philosopher.  It was still a time when people could seek out writers and sages and visit with them.  Sadly, it is the kind of pilgrimage that is no longer tenable.  Writers, some as celebrated as the Kardashians are these days, are protected by their publishing houses like sacred cows.

I suspect Bob was adorable (shy, as he notes) and George smitten in his old age with a younger man paying him a visit.  I do hope that Bob returned to Rome and took a walk with George among the stone pines and polished rubble of the Eternal City.

It's a cut world, and I'm not