Word: santayana
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Santayana received an inheritance, immediately resigned from Harvard, settled in Oxford. Repelled by German culture, at home in England, he was pro-Ally during the War, wrote Egotism in German Philosophy during the War years. After the War Santayana moved to Paris, has lived for the past twelve years in an obscure hotel in Rome, sees few visitors, has no friends who live permanently in Rome, carries on a wide correspondence, writing letters that are as polished as his published works. He admires Proust, reads Jacques Maritain, is interested in Spengler, Freud, Hindu philosophy, occasionally passes days without speaking...
...When Santayana's second philosophical work was published in 1900, William James wrote of it: ''What a perfection of rottenness in a philosophy: I don't think I ever knew the anti-realistic view to be propounded with so impudently superior an air. . . . Although I absolutely reject the Platonism of it, I have literally squealed with delight at the imperturbable perfection with which the position is laid down, page after page." When The Life of Reason appeared in 1905, James had changed his opinion: ''Santayana's book is a great...
...popular lecturer, Santayana's courses became famed. His students included T. S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, Walter Lippmann, Bronson Cutting, Felix Frankfurter. Robert Benchley attended his classes, said that he could not understand the words but that the music fascinated him. Continuing to live in isolation, Santayana was commonly considered snobbish. Disliking Boston society, he called it "a Harvard faculty meeting without any business." Although he enjoyed teaching, described it as "a delightful paternal art," he admitted disliking ''the taste of academic straw," was ironically amused when President Lowell declared that he was not interested in the degree...
...Novel. Central figure of Santayana's strange first novel is Oliver Alden, robust, grey-eyed, precociously-intelligent son of a wealthy, ambitionless New England family that has fallen into a vague and harmless melancholy. Oliver's father married only from a sense of duty, spends most of his time on his yacht, drifting about the world, while occasional intimations of his paganism and vice reach Great Falls, Conn., to scandalize the family and cloud the contentment of his wife. In a loveless household Oliver grows up, excels at games and studies without exerting himself, does not begin...
Readers who reach this point of Author Santayana's narrative are likely to remain to the end. As Oliver develops intellectually under the stimulus of his father's conversation, he also develops physically in a simple sensuous joy of living under the influence of the sea, of sport, of life on the lovely ship. But as he awakens to the world, Oliver also becomes aware of depths of mystery and misery that lie beneath the summer surface of reality. His father's companion and servant is Jim Darnley, engaging, unscrupulous, intelligent Englishman who has left the British...