Bumper Sticker Santayana-isms

George Santayana (1863-1952)

At last month's session, on April 16th, we took up George Santayana's essay "Masks," from his 1922 book Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies. Santayana was a Harvard-based academic philosopher for over 20 years before he resigned his post to become a full-time writer. His literary output was vast, and included philosophical tracts such as The Life of Reason and Realms of Being, poems, essays, a three-volume autobiography, Persons and Places, and a thinly veiled autobiographical novel, The Last Puritan, which became a best seller upon its publication in 1935.

It was remarked at the meeting that Santayana's greatest gift was creating pithy sentences you could put on a bumper sticker.

The famous saying "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it," for example, is from Santayana.

"Masks," is a profound exposition on the postures and costumes and yes, masks, we all adopt to get through the hurly-burly of our daily lives.  Santayana employs an over-arching metaphor of the world as a stage (a nod, of course, to the Bard). He talks of tragic masks, comic masks, Carnival(!), and offers as his denouement to the piece a section titled "The Mask of the Philosopher." In this last section he writes, "Among tragic masks may be counted all systems of philosophy and religion."

In looking back over "Masks," permit me to offer my candidate for line best suited for a bumper sticker (and perhaps you have one as well):

"We should see more and believe less."