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

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Wealth was another big advantage that Loeser had over Santayana. During their early university years, when the two friends went to the theater or the opera in Boston, it was Loeser who inevitably paid; and when, later, they traveled together in Italy, Santayana would contribute a fixed (and modest) daily sum to their expenses, leaving Loeser, who spoke the language, to make the arrangements and pay the bills. Loeser untied the purse with as few qualms as Santayana had in accepting this generosity, because «it was simply a question of making possible little plans that pleased us but that were beyond my unaided means.»¹¹

Aside from a common interest in «books and pictures», one of the factors that obviously brought the two young students together was their status as outsiders, due to their religious origins, respectively Catholic and Jewish, in an overwhelmingly Protestant institution. For Santayana, this marginal status was somewhat compensated by his association, through his mother’s first marriage, with one of Boston’s prominent Brahmin families. But not only was Loeser unashamedly Jewish, his father owned a «dry-goods store», two facts that «cut him off, in democratic America, from the ruling society.»¹² This seemed strange to Santayana, considering how much more cultivated his friend was than «the leaders of undergraduate fashion or athletics.» ¹³ A somewhat ambivalent portrait follows this remark about Loeser’s isolation at Harvard: