Word: santayana
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...audience transfixed. Once some early exposition is out of the way, his narrative races along at a relentless pace, spinning off subplots and love stories as it goes. Green knows the drama speaks for itself, so he never bothers to halt the action for gratuitous sermons or quotes from Santayana...
DIED. John Hall Wheelock, 91, lifelong poet and former chief editor at Charles Scribner's Sons; in Manhattan. At Scribner's, Wheelock worked with Novelist Thomas Wolfe, Philosopher George Santayana and, in a distinguished series of anthologies, launched a number of American poets, including James Dickey and Louis Simpson. His own first book of poetry was published when he was 25, but much of his serene, stately, affirmative verse "poured out," he said, after he had retired as an editor nearly 50 years later...
...writes about this war while admitting that "people don't even want to hear about it." Happily, he does not take the next step and insist that people damn well ought to hear about it for their own good. Nor does he justify his work by parading Santayana's maxim about the uses of history; instead, he deflates it: "Those who remember the past are condemned to repeat it too." He preaches no sermons, draws no morals, enters no ideological disputes. He simply suggests that some stories must be told-not because they will delight and instruct...
...Maybe Santayana had it wrong after all. "Those who cannot remember the past," he said, "are condemned to repeat it." But in movieland, it is those who can remember the past who seem to feel compelled to repeat it. In New York, New York, Director Martin Scorsese recalls the big-band era. His is not the actual historical period, of course; on V-J day, 1945, when the film begins, Scorsese was two, and Scriptwriter Earl Mac Rauch, who devised the original story, was not yet born. What Scorsese is evoking is an epoch of moviemaking: the heyday of lavish...
...this country had a moral significance that transcended its military or economic power. Unique among the nations of the world, America was created as a conscious act by men dedicated to a set of political and ethical principles they believed to be of universal applicability. Small wonder, then, that Santayana concluded: "To be an American is of itself almost a moral condition...