Word: santayana
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DIALOGUES IN LIMBO (249 pp.)-George Santayana-Scribner...
...midst of a world war, both the U.S. State Department and the Vatican thought the book important enough to be smuggled out of Italy in a diplomatic pouch. When Persons and Places was published in the U.S. in 1944, it became the second book of Philosopher George Santayana to win the popular accolade of the Book-of-the-Month Club (the first: his only novel, The Last Puritan). Readers who couldn't be bribed to look at a book of philosophy were beguiled by a style so urbane and a wit so civilized as to make even the cloistered...
Last week in Rome, 84-year-old Santayana had two more books in completed manuscript and one in the polishing stage; but he was determined that the publication of all three would have to wait till after his death. One is a book of allegorical verse, emphatically entitled Posthumous Poems. Another is the final volume of his autobiography, in which, his friends believe, he has discussed other persons and places with an old philosopher's candor. The third is Dominations and Powers, a long-awaited philosophical study of politics, and the only one of his books he believes...
...Insurance of Death. If he sticks to his purpose, the only new work from Santayana ip what remains of his lifetime may well be the three new chapters he has added to Dialogues in Limbo, a book first published in 1926 and re-issued last week. It is one of the few of his books that Santayana himself now finds pleasure in rereading. On these dialogues, as a philosopher, he is willing to stand or fall: "They are the truest interpretation of my philosophy. If anyone understands them, he understands me." In prose so immaculately manicured that only the polish...
...Santayana's philosophy ("My system is not mine, nor new") pragmatism, naturalism, hedonism and materialism leap into the philosophical arena flashing beautifully tempered verbal weapons, gracefully swipe at each other with sardonic wit and brilliant exposition-until all fall back exhausted by their civilized exhibitionism, each one's argument largely canceled out by all the others. There can be little doubt that Santayana is speaking for himself as referee when The Stranger says: "A good life seems to me a good, and a bad life an evil; but life and death simply are neither good nor evil...