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

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The marvel was that with all these morbid preoccupations filling his days and nights Westenholz retained to the last his speculative freedom. Everything interested him, he could be just and even enthusiastic about impersonal things. I profited by this survival of clearness in his thought: he rejoiced in my philosophy, even if he could not assimilate it or live by it; but the mere idea of such a synthesis delighted him, and my Realm of Truth in particular aroused his intellectual enthusiasm. In his confusion he saw the possibility of clearness, and as his friend Reichhardt said, he became sympathetically hell begeistert, filled with inspired light.³⁴

At the end of a letter sent from Cortina d’Ampezzo on July 20, 1931, Santayana takes leave of Westenholz thus: «I wish I could communicate to you the calm, physical and moral, which I enjoy; but I can only send you my impotent good wishes.» And eight years later he announces and comments on the death of his friend as follows:

Hans Reichhardt has given me the belated news that my friend Westenholz killed himself on August 5th […]. We live in old-fashioned tragic times. Westenholz was an extraordinarily well-educated and intelligent person, omnivorous and tireless in following every intellectual interest, but hopelessly neurasthenic and psychopathic all his life, which had become of late a protracted nightmare. At my age the death of friends makes little impression; we are socially all dead long since, for every important purpose; but closing a life is (as Heidegger teaches) rounding it out, given (sic) it wholeness, and in one sense brings the entire figure of a friend more squarely before one than his life ever did when it was still subject to variations.³⁵