Читать книгу Recently Discovered Letters of George Santayana. Cartas recién descubiertas de George Santayana онлайн

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In these letters, which are now published and translated for the first time, the most characteristic features of the thinker and the human being are distilled. They mirror and reflect a life told as it is lived, and they simultaneously confirm an endless narrative apprenticeship and negate a way of doing philosophy that is alien to everyday life. They show, instead, life accompanied by its narrative, indeed intensified and conjured up by the constant exercise of writing. And now we have the privileged opportunity to look once again, with the help of materials that provide new vistas, into the fascinating life of reason unfolded by the universal thinker and citizen of the world George Santayana.

The origin of these letters can be traced back to the time when Santayana was a very young student at Harvard, aged 23, and they end when he reached 74, once he had already completed most of his work and was settled definitively in Rome. In terms of chronology, the first group of letters (27), addressed to Charles A. Loeser, began in September 1886 and continued until Santayana’s definitive departure from the United States in October 1912; the second, more extensive (61), addressed to Baron Albert von Westenholz, began at the turn of the century, in July 1903, and concluded in January 1937, fifteen years before Santayana’s death in Rome. Neither of these two singular friends were anonymous figures. Both form part of a certain social lineage and, in spite of their different profiles, the two of them embody a tradition and a cultural heritage to whose distinctive mark Santayana, rather than a direct participant, was a sensitive, receptive and detached witness, as we shall see in not a few of his missives.