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

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Pictures and books, persons and places, landscapes and passages. So many comings and goings, so many departures and arrivals, crossing countries on trains and continents on ships, staying in hotels and university residences, stopping off at memorable cafés, giving lectures here and there, reading and writing incessantly. “I have written so many letters”, he told Loeser in 1887, when his epistolary activity was still very recent, “that I never know what I have told one man and what another”… This handful of letters, which adds to the rest of his abundant correspondence, is the material proof that writing, for Santayana, in any of its registers, is one more way —everyday, immediate, full of genial impromptus—, of practicing philosophy. And the philosopher practiced it not only in solitude but also as a genuine expression of intellectual friendship. The best definition of philosophy for Santayana is that which identifies it with the life of reason, a life that can be shared and enriched through the joy of dialogue and conversation. These newly discovered letters are a sensitive, lucid and delightful proof of that conversation. We have now the unique opportunity to join in, thus enriching ourselves as readers, sharing the common purpose of reaching the best version of ourselves, our most human dimension. Somehow, by participating ourselves in the experience offered by these pages, guided by Santayana’s hand, we will somehow be able to use his own words at the end of these letters and make them our own: “I saw things I shall never forget”. And in passing, we will have come to know the author of these letters a little better for, as William James stated in A Pluralistic Universe, “a man’s vision is the great fact about him.”