Читать книгу Recently Discovered Letters of George Santayana. Cartas recién descubiertas de George Santayana онлайн
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He was not good-looking, although he had a neat figure, of middle height, and nice hands: but his eyes were dead, his complexion muddy, and his features pinched, although not especially Jewish. On the other hand, he was extremely well-spoken, and there was nothing about him in bad taste.
The ambivalence is reflected in Santayana’s overall judgment on his relationship with Loeser: «To me he was always an agreeable companion, and if our friendship never became intimate, this was due rather to a certain defensive reserve in him than to any withdrawal on my part.»14 Loeser’s «defensive reserve» and the asymmetry it introduced in their relation, is a constant theme in the pages devoted to him in Persons and Places. When he lived in Florence as a rich bachelor, notes Santayana, Loeser seemed also to be oddly friendless, in spite of knowing the whole Anglo-American colony; and Santayana complains that, in the 1920s, when he regularly stayed at Charles Strong’s Villa Le Balze in Fiesole, next to Florence, Loeser, who had a car, never visited him or invited him to his house: «this made me doubt whether Loeser had any affection for me, such as I had for him, and whether it was faute de mieux, as a last resort in too much solitude, that in earlier years he had been so friendly».15 But this melancholic doubt is quickly dismissed by the ever-realist Santayana: «circumstances change, one changes as much as other people, and it would be unreasonable to act or feel in the same way when the circumstances are different.»16 All in all, Santayana’s gratitude to Loeser for having shown him Italy and for his guidance in the visual arts, is unqualified.