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

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And among the names, as Daniel Pinkas points out, those referring to paintings and books stand out. And to painting and reading are added other diverse expressions of art of which Santayana gives a good account by recreating for his friends his frequent visits to museums, and to the theatre and the opera, or to musical concerts and telling them about cultural tours as well as about his walks and observations on architecture (about which he intends to write a book —“if it is ever written”— as mentioned in his correspondence to Westenholz in 1905), one of the professions he would have cultivated had he been endowed, like Pessoa, with heteronyms.

As a polyhedral artefact, this volume of letters also invites different approaches and other reading angles. On the one hand, it lends itself to be read as the catalogue of an imaginary museum, similar to the one conceived by André Malraux, filled with impressionistic notes. In this sense, these pages could very well give rise to another parallel or complementary volume illustrated with each of the works of art mentioned, which would undoubtedly craft a beautiful diptych. On the other hand, this correspondence, which totals 90 letters from 1886 to 1937, could also be considered an extension or appendix to his autobiography Persons and Places, or a collection of notes complementary to the Little Essays. When regarded as variations on a series, even if the contents of these letters are familiar to us because they refer to many of his works, they always offer, in their meditated spontaneity, that which is proper to philosophy: the invaluable opportunity to rethink reality and thus reassess our contract with it throughout our fragile and ephemeral existence.