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A Philosopher's Life and Death
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13939 |
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BOOK WORLD
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2 / 1988 |
5,434 Words |
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James J. Thompson, Jr.
James J. Thompson, Jr., is the book review editor for The New
Oxford Review. He has written three books: Tried as by Fire:
Southern Baptists and the Religious Controversies of the 1920s
(Mercer University Press, 1982); Christian Classics Revisited
(Ignatius Press, 1983); and Fleeing the Whore of Babylon: A
Modern Conversion Story (Christian Classics, Inc., 1986). He
has coedited (with George M. Curtis III) The Southern Essays
of Richard M. Weaver (Liberty Press, 1987). |
GEORGE SANTAYANA: A BIOGRAPHY
John McCormick
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
612 pp., $30.00
PERSONS AND PLACES: FRAGMENTS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHY
George Santayana
Cambridge: MIT Press, 1986.
761 pp., $35.00
George Santayana suffers the odd distinction of being at once exceptionally well known and almost completely unknown. In places as remote as Allagash, Maine, Truckee, California, and Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, one is liable to run across a newspaper reporter, radio announcer, or village idiot who can glibly quote Santayana. A curious thing, though: It is always the same quotation. Surely you know which one. Haven't you, with studied nonchalance, insinuated it into a cocktail-conversation? And the name Santayana itself: How wonderfully it rolls off the tongue with a concatenation of musical syllables! All together: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."
Fame and obscurity
Did Santayana do nothing more than utter these imperishable words? Students of American cultural history associate him with the concept of the Genteel Tradition, but how many of them have read his book of 1931, The General Tradition at Bay, much less his earlier and more acerbic swipe at our country, Character and Opinion in the United States? Santayana's name is at
... (1996 of 33681 Characters)
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