Remembering Santayana
A philosopher who once graced the cover of Time is now largely forgotten. His ideas--utterly materialist yet deeply spiritual--are ripe for reconsideration.
George Santayana (1863-1952) regarded the world with serene detachment. He savored all the tart ironies and bittersweet paradoxes of existence, and he cheerfully faced up to the futility of human striving. The Spanish-born sage would surely be amused to observe how he is remembered today, almost a half-century after his death. His reputation, such as it now is, rests upon a single sentence, a portentous and wise-sounding (though often misquoted or misused) epigram taken from the middle of a paragraph in one of his philosophical works: "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."