Word: santayana
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...polished publication entitled Mondays at Nine or Pedagogues On Parade. Paul Brooks '32 and T. Graydon Upton '31 contributed a great deal of consistently fine and funny light verse. Carl E. Pickhardt's '31 caricatures of famous professors of that era--Barret Wendell, Charles T. Copeland, Irving Babbit, George Santayana, and G. L. Kittredge--are excellent drawings in the style of Sir Max Beerbohm. Part of the verse that accompanies the caricature of Kittredge follows...
Philosophy was George Santayana's shop, and after hours he liked to linger on at the café tables of the mind, sipping moments of beauty and watching the passing show with its persistent drama and recurring vanities. Even if building towers of systematic truths had been congenial to him, Santayana banished it with his basic premise, i.e., "Chaos is perhaps at the bottom of everything." His letters, edited by his longtime confidant and disciple, Philosopher Daniel Cory, cover 66 years, from the year of his Harvard graduation through the teaching days and European travels to the comfortable room...
Hasty-Pudding Lady. Just how finicky, the 22-year-old Santayana makes plain in the collection's very first letter, as he announces to a friend that he is starting out "avowedly with no other purpose but that of living in order to observe life." Perhaps this spectator role might not have appealed to Santayana so much if a New England chill had not entered his Latin blood when he was transplanted as a boy of eight from his home in Avila, Spain to Boston, Mass. Boston seared his youthful psyche with the indelible brand of the outcast...
Bird in Puritan Cage. In the main, Santayana bit his tongue and bided his time until his savings and a bequest made him modestly independent. In 1912, at the age of 47, he set off to live in Europe for the rest of his life. Escaped from his Puritan cage, Santayana had released himself not only for flitting from London to Paris to Florence to Venice to Rome but for strenuous mental flights in the bulk of his 30-odd works. The delight of the letters is that Santayana is always ready to stray off the course of his philosophic...
...Must Stop Scrawling." Himself the monitor of a philosophic flux-materialism, rationalism, idealism, skepticism-Santayana reveals in the letters not the direction but the drive behind his thinking. To him, philosophy seems to have been a kind of verbal finger painting. As the nuns of the Little Company of Mary padded about him during the last decade of his life, he drew an appealing sketch of old age which also sums up much of his carefully Epicurean philosophy: "The charm I find in old age-for I was never happier than I am now-comes of having learned to live...