Meaney, Thomas. "The Tragedy of Happiness." WALL STREET JOURNAL December 11, 2009.

 Do Americans have a national character? The idea sounds plausible enough—until you try to pin it down.

Are we a nation of individualists pursuing happiness as we each see fit or a country of conformists taking the road most traveled by? The children of Puritans striving to build the city upon a hill or the heirs of Jamestown, driven by the promise of profit? Prudish homebodies or easy riders? Whoever we are, we seem to suffer from a kind of divided personality.

No one could have agreed more than George Santayana (1863-1952). He was once a household name in America: a Spanish-born Harvard professor whose face once graced the cover of Time magazine; a best-selling novelist (The Last Puritan), popular essayist and memoir-writer; and an intellectual mentor to the columnist Walter Lippmann and the poet Wallace Stevens. In his later years he became a permanent expatriate who ended his days being tended by Catholic nuns in Italy, an "old philosopher in Rome," as Stevens put it.

Santayana is most remembered today for a single, painfully overquoted sentence: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it." But in his lifetime he achieved stature as a philosopher for a whole series of books about the nature of human reason, the sense of beauty and the value of religion. His greatest subject was perhaps his adopted homeland. His writings about America still have the freshness of new discoveries, and they are enlivened—like nearly everything he wrote—by sharp turns of phrase and pungent judgments.

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3rd International Conference on George Santayana, Faculty of Philosophy & Sciences of Education, University of Valencia & Limbo, November 16-18, 2009.

The first day will be devoted to considering the place Santayana has in the world, particularly to his relation with Spain, the USA, Europe and Argentina. The second will treat Santayana's relation with philosophy, in particular with pragmatism and Wittgenstein. The closing day will deal with art, literature and aesthetics. There will be some time devoted to papers, listening to music and reading poems. Among the professors invited are Herman Saatkamp and Manuel Garrido, who will open and close the Conference respectively, Pedro García, Krzyzstof Skowronski, Graziella Fantini, Vicente Cervera, Matt Flamn, John Lachs, Ángel Manuel Faerna, Ramón del Castillo, Vicente Sanfélix, David Dilworth, Cayetano Estébanez and Giuseppe Patella. At the beginning of the Conference a book will be distributed dealing with Santayana (Materiales para una utopía: una antología poética y dos textos filosóficos). Lectures will be published in a book form and papers in a CD. Deadlines: The deadline for sending the summaries will be July 30 and for sending the complete article will be September 1. Confirmation of acceptance will be communicated before September 30. For further information, visit the conference webpage here: http://internationalconferenceonsantayana.blogspot.com/.