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

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Thus, in these letters we find, threading their narrative, a sort of surprising patchwork, a microcosm filled with forms of life pulsating in each message, within every word, with highly suggestive echoes in resonance with the rest of the thinker’s work. The epistolary genre, as cultivated by Santayana and his contemporaries, is less and less frequent, yet another social practice that is being lost, swept away by the speed and formats of the digital media. For this very reason, these handwritten letters now have the added value of being approached as ethno-texts, noble and unique remains of an anachronistic genre.

On the other hand, Santayana’s letters partake in a rich conversation where profound reflections are intermingled with everyday matters and where a plethora of interests and a plurality of perspectives inhabit the very space they shape. Here we can clearly perceive the deep thinker and the human being, the lucidity of the former and the frailties of the latter, the chiaroscuros that Santayana himself detects in his own persona and to which he applies an enormous capacity for humour, irony and self-criticism. There is a little of everything in this volume, which acts as a kind of mailbox into which messages have been deposited, year after year, over the course of half a century. Alongside the short, instrumental letters, treatise-like letters are also found containing cogent, concentrated arguments reminiscent of the developments found in the thinker’s major works. Read as a whole, they eloquently express his material and vital concerns, intertwined with other speculations and dilemmas that range from his early estrangement at being at Harvard to his long-cherished desire to leave the university in order to practice philosophy as a way of life rather than being a philosophy professor; they also encompass reflections on love and death, contacts with publishers —including their rejection or acceptance to publish his works, the constant planning of his travels and sojourns, digressions on Homeric times, notes on the perception of life as a dream, and asides on his own writing process…