A Toast See this bowl of purple wine, Life-blood of the lusty vine! All the warmth of summer suns In the vintage liquid runs, All the glow of winter nights Plays about its jewel lights, Thoughts of time when love was young Lurk its ruby drops among, And its deepest depths are dyed With delight of friendship tried. Worthy offering,… Read more →
Tag: santayana
More Santayana
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, I could not… Read more →
The Poet’s Testament
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. When he died in Rome… Read more →
No Practical Value
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 titanium “Stilletto” model.… Read more →
Punting
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 entertainment tonight, I turn… Read more →
An old wine softens old regrets
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 80-pager there that will… Read more →
Proud and Unrepentant: Part 3
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 the field of aesthetics,… Read more →
The Kasîdah of Hâjî Abdû El-Yezdî
Years ago I read through Philip José Farmer‘s Riverworld books. Those of you who have read them will recall that Richard BurtonWikipedia entry (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 of Burton‘s “Kasîdah“,… Read more →
Wednesday Linkfest
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 does slightly warm my heart-cockles… Read more →
