In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Epilogue on My Host, The World Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography. Volume one of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. Edited by William G. Holzberger and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr., with an Introduction by Richard C. Lyon. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1986, 537–47. This is the final chapter of the third and final volume of Santayana’s autobiography (Chapter XXXII in the one-volume edition). Santayana completed the third volume in 1945 but wished it to be published posthumously. He permitted excerpts (with minor changes) to appear in The Atlantic Monthly prior to his death, including the present selection ( The Atlantic Monthly, 183 [ January 1949]: 26–30). In 1953, the year following Santayana ’s death, the third volume was published. Santayana had originally titled it In the Old World, but he reportedly changed it to Seeking Places for a Chosen Life. The publisher disliked this title and prevailed on Santayana’s literary executor, Daniel Cory, to change the title to My Host the World, after the title of the final chapter; the critical edition title, My Host, The World, matches Santayana’s final manuscript. In calling the world his host, Santayana explained that the world is “not meant for man, but habitable by him, and possible to exploit, with prudence, in innumerable ways” ( ES, 30–31). Santayana had intended his three-volume work eventually to be published as one volume under the title Persons and Places: Fragments of Autobiography, as it was in 1963 and again in 1986, when it appeared as volume one of the critical edition of The Works of George Santayana. Persons and places people the world; they individuate its parts; and I have devoted this book to recording some of them that remain alive in my memory. Mine are insignificant recollections: for even when the themes happen to have some importance as persons and places in the great world, it is not at all in that capacity that I prize and describe them. I keep only some old miniature or some little perspective that caught my eye in passing, when the persons perhaps were young and the places empty and not dressed up to receive visitors, as are museums, libraries, ball-rooms and dinner-tables. Those were free glimpses of the world that I could love and could carry away. They were my consolations. Yet the very contrast between these glimpses, all picturesque and aerial, and the vast obscure inexorable world from which they came, forced me gradually to form some notion of that material world also. We were a blue-sea family; our world was that of colonial officials and great merchants . From the beginning I learned to think of the earth as a globe with its surface chiefly salt water, a barren treacherous and intractable waste for mankind, yet tempting and beautiful and swarming with primitive animals not possible to tame or humanise but sometimes good to eat. In fine, I opened my eyes on the world with the conviction that it was inhuman: not meant for man, but habitable by him, and possible to exploit, Private poetical character of these reminiscences. Yet I loved land and sea in their inhumanity. 31 Epilogue on My Host, The World with prudence, in innumerable ways: a conviction that everything ever since has confirmed. One peculiarity was common to all these possible satisfactions: they brought something perfect, consummate, final. The sea, after no matter what storms, returned to its equilibrium and placidity; its gamut was definite. Voyages all led to some port. The vastness and violence of nature, in challenging and often decimating mankind, by no means tend to dehumanise it. The quality of attainable goods may change, and also the conditions for attaining them; but the way is always open, at the right time, for the right sort of animal and for the right sort of mind. Dogs have their day; arts have their dates; and the great question is not what age you live in or what art you pursue, but what perfection you can achieve in that art under those circumstances. The great master of sympathy with nature, in my education, was Lucretius. Romantic poets and philosophers, when they talk of nature, mean only landscape or other impressions due to aerial perspectives, sensuous harmonies of colour or form, or vital intoxications, such as those of riding, sea-faring, or mountain -climbing. Nature is loved for heightening self-consciousness and prized for ministering to human comfort and luxury, but...

Share