To Daniel MacGhie Cory
Hotel Danieli
Venice. September 28, 1939
Hans Reichhardt has given me the belated news that my friend Westenholz killed himself on August 5th; also that Hans’ mother died a week after he and his brother had been called away (for military service, I suppose) from home. 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 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.
. . . .
Thank you for George Sturgis’s letter. They seem to be in a dreadful state of excitement and mental confusion. He says they have four radios going at once in their house, don’t understand what is happening anywhere, and have no news of their son, aged 17, who is lost in “Europe”.
How quiet and simple life is in Italy—though now without coffee!
From The Letters of George Santayana: Book Six, 1937-1940. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2004.
Location of manuscript: Butler Library, Columbia University, New York NY