'Cultivate Imagination, Love It'

Sorry to say, readers inevitably outgrow certain cherished writers and books, and not merely those nominally intended for children.* Not sorry exactly, because the process of sloughing off childish things is part of growing up. The emotion stirred is more like wistful regret, like outgrowing a friend. The mind, after all, is elastic enough to feel the loss of things we no longer prize or even abhor.

I spent a good portion of my life reading and revering two canonical American writers, Thoreau and Whitman. Today, I find both largely repellent, as writers and men. Thoreau’s prose, especially in the journals, can still be read for pleasure, when it isn’t cloyingly self-regarding. He was a snob, an enthusiastic despiser, like many bohemians, of ordinary human beings. His politics are rooted in contempt. He judged the psychopathic John Brown a hero. Whitman is one of literature’s heroic gasbags. He often approaches unreadability, though I do admire his service in military field hospitals during the Civil War.          

In contrast, some bookish loyalties remain strong and grow even deeper. One such writer for me is George Santayana. I read The Sense of Beauty (1896) in high school and was smitten. In 1968, Washington Square Press published a series of twenty-two books in its Great American Thinkers series, including George Santayana by Willard E. Arnett. It was tough going for a kid not yet well-read in philosophy, but I persisted. Here are several brief samples of Santayana’s prose that suggest why he remains important to me. In his autobiography Persons and Places he writes:

“Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, but do not let it deceive you. Enjoy the world, travel over it, and learn its ways, but do not let it hold you. . . .To possess things and persons in idea is the only pure good to be got out of them; to possess them physically or legally is a burden and a snare.”

This is from the chapter titled “Form” in Santayana’s first published work in prose, The Sense of Beauty:

“Whenever beauty is really seen and loved, it has a definite embodiment: the eye has precision, the work has style, and the object has perfection. The kind of perfection may indeed be new; and if the discovery of new perfections is to be called romanticism, then romanticism is the beginning of all aesthetic life. But if by romanticism we mean indulgence in confused suggestion and in the exhibition of turgid force, then there is evidently need of education, of attentive labour, to disentangle the beauties so vaguely felt, and give each its adequate embodiment.”

You can see why a budding Midwestern aesthete was permanently hooked. The sole blight on my otherwise unqualified love of Santayana’s gifts is his vulgar, ignorant strain of anti-Semitism. We think of anti-Semites as thuggish Brown Shirts or Labour Party loyalists, but even so sophisticated an artist as Santayana was not immune to the Jew-hating infection.

Santayana was born on this date, Dec. 16, in 1863, and died on Sept. 26, 1952, age eighty-eight.

[*When asked to select their favorite book, politicians and other celebrities often name a children’s title; say, Goodnight Moon. This suggests two things: 1.) They wish to appear whimsical and childlike, not stuffy and grown-up. 2.) They’ve not read another book since his age four.]