Word: santayana
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
George S. Santayana, Class of 1886, was to live in conditions not much better than this for his entire four years at Harvard. His situation was not uncommon for a significant portion of Harvard undergraduates at that time. They ate, drank, slept and studied cheaply...
...there were those who lived the good life as Harvard undergraduates. In turn of the century Harvard, those who were not compelled by finances to live as Santayana did, found more suitable private accommodations in a fairly grand style at the clubs or in apartments along Mount Auburn Street...
Those words did not always apply to The New Yorker. Santayana once wrote: "All problems are divided into two classes, soluble questions, which are trivial, and important questions, which are insoluble." For many years the magazine took that epigram seriously. Through the Depression and even through the war, Harold Ross, the magazine's legendary founder, preferred not to confront moral issues. "His old dread," recalled the owlish humorist James Thurber, "that the once carefree New Yorker, going nowhere blithely, like a wandering minstrel, was likely to become rigidly 'grim,' afflicted his waking hours and his dreams...
...could have imagined that the concept of short-order celebrity would have gone so far? TV now spits out stars faster than a kid's Fourth of July sparkler. "Everybody wants to get into the act," as Jimmy Durante used to say. But as George Santayana used to say, occasionally there is "a lyric cry in the midst of business...
George Melish, the flashy nova of John Lahr's second novel, is not quite Santayana's last puritan, and his cries are more like yelps. He is, in fact, the butt of Lahr's ambivalent sympathy for the generation currently entering middle age-those who succeeded within the old rules only to find that the next wave of hustlers was trying to change the game entirely...