If you infer the man from the books, you may go seriously wrong, because only a part of my nature has gone into my writings, and not all my writings have been published.
—George Santayana to Baker Brownell, December 26, 1939
One sometimes speaks of the proper time in life to read certain writers: no Hemingway after twenty, no Proust before forty, that sort of thing. Less attention is given to the best time of day to read a writer. The literarily omnivorous Edmund Wilson said he was unable to read the Marquis de Sade at breakfast. (I shouldn’t think he would go down too smoothly at bedtime, either.) Off and on in recent years, I have found myself reading George Santayana—the eight volumes of his letters, his three volumes of autobiography, his essays, and his one novel, The Last Puritan—directly upon arising in the morning. Not only did the happy anticipation of returning to him serve as a reward for getting out of bed, but Santayana’s detachment, a detachment leading onto serenity, invariably had a calming effect. Reading him in the early morning made the world feel somehow more understandable, even its multiple mysteries, if not penetrable, taking on a tincture of poetry that made the darkest of them seem less menacing.
A major division among writers is the one between those who present themselves as warmly engaged with the world and those who value their cool distance from it. The problem
