While that last piece was read at Santayana’s death, I’m slightly more enamoured with a piece he wrote on the death of a friend, simply entitled “To W.P.“.
It’s not too long, so you could go read the whole thing. Here are two bits that particularly resonate with parts of my personal philosophy:
Another, if I would, [...]
George Santayana began as a poet, and, though he came to be known as philosopher, teacher and critic, a poet he remained. There was nothing blank, free or modern about his verses’; they rhymed, and what he had to say often sounded like a translation from the Latin classics, with which he was intimately familiar. [...]
You know what I want, that is ridiculously expensive, and that I can in no way practically justify, but which I still have a serious hankering for?
A sword cane.
At least twice a week for the last couple of months, I’ve spent some time looking at the photos at the Burger Knives sword cane pages–especially the [...]
Since my blogging time today got subsumed into a lengthy debate about the gender-neutral pronoun in English, the use of “man” to mean homo sapiens and not “a single male human”, and related matters, I have to punt on blogging tonight. (Although the discussion should be the seed of a good post later.)
So, for your [...]
I mentioned in an earlier post that I had been delighted to find a whole bunch of Santayana stuff at archive.org, including a poetry collection I was unfamiliar with.
Well, while in Boston, I’ve been using stolen moments to work my way through that collection. I haven’t made much headway with the initial sections–there’s a two-part [...]
So, our discussions of the proud and unrepentant brings us to my personal favourite: the Lucifer of George Santayana.
Santayana’s book-length poem/five-act play, Lucifer: A Theological Tragedy, was one of his early works, and I think it’s fair to say is it’s pretty obscure. Santayana is well-known for his contributions to philosophy, perhaps most notably in [...]
Years ago I read through Philip José Farmer’s Riverworld books. Those of you who have read them will recall that Richard Burton1 (along with lots of other historical personages) played a pretty big role in the series.
One of the indirect results of my doing that reading was that I was driven to find a copy [...]
B3n (yes, that is a three), who is another online acquaintance from the Delphi days, is just as much of a language pedant as I am, and shows it while talking about the list of recent additions to the OED. I completely agree that they’re taking the whole ‘descriptive’ thing a bit far…
While it [...]
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Mr. McLaren
Trish
DeclanMr. McLaren
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