STATE  OF  THE  WORLD  FORUM

FRIENDSHIP  AND  SENTIMENT

Lindsay  Mell

State  of  The  World  Forum
Occasional  Paper  2005/2

ACADEMY OF THE WORD
October  2005

‘There are places I remember, all my life, though some have changed

Some forever not for better, some have gone, and some remain

All these places have their moments, with lovers and friends I still can recall

Some are dead and some are living – In My Life I love them all.

‘But of all these friends and lovers there is no-one compares with you

And these memories lose their meaning when I think of love as something new

Though I know I’ll never lose affection for people and friends who went before

I know I’ll often stop and think about them – In My Life I love you more.’

- 	slightly modified and paraphrased lyrics of the song In My Life

John Lennon and Paul McCartney – from The Beatles Rubber Soul album

[Lyrics ascribed to John Lennon]

‘I used to say ‘No promises – let’s keep it simple’; but nobody will comfort me tonight

I’m wide awake at 4 am without a friend in sight … Hangin’ on a hope I’ll be alright

I know I need to be in love … I know I’ve wasted too much time

I know I seek perfection in a quite imperfect world

And I’m fool enough to think that’s what I’ll find.’

-	slightly paraphrased lyrics to the song I Know I Need to be in Love

performed by Karen Carpenter

‘To all the girls we’ve loved before.’  –  Willie Nelson and Julio Iglesias

Dedicated  to  Love

Among the most well recognised and resonant songs associated with Australian popular culture is one performed by the group with the unlikely name Cold Chisel.  The theme of this song is The Last Train Out of Sydney.  There are several somewhat caustic lines in the song, reminiscent of Aussie ‘pub’ and ‘club’ culture over the years.  However, among the most acerbic is the reference to ‘girls’ of the time as having ‘hearts … held in fast suburban chains’. 

This reference represents for me a potential relevant development on an earlier theme explored by the group which pertains to a Choir Girl whom the hero of the song vows to ‘look after’, ‘lead … down the corridors of healing … and never ever let her go’, because ‘she’s alone’ and ‘crying like a refugee’.  Meanwhile, the girl referred to in the song loves her prospective saviour ‘like a sister’ and ‘an only child’ while ‘looking like a choir girl’. 

Although these ominous themes exude a most specific contemporary cast in the songs, they can be cross-associated with a couple of themes brought forward by the paradoxically well-regarded yet barely recognised ‘American’ philosopher, George Santayana.  These themes, which emerge from Santayana’s only novel The Last Puritan (1937), seem to be culturally resonant in the context of our prospectively evolving contemporary culture. 

Writing of times situated at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century, 
Santayana’s prominent American aristocratic ‘girl’ character, Edith, is most reminiscent of the girls held in ‘fast suburban chains’ for me – only in this case the ‘suburb’ is Boston in the early 1900s.  The focal character, Oliver, in Santayana’s novel, soon learns just how tightly entrenched those ‘suburban chains’ can be, as will be soon revealed throughout this seminar paper.  

Meanwhile, Santayana’s other prominent ‘girl’ character, 
the English Oxford vicar’s daughter, Rose Darnley, is particularly reminiscent for me of the ‘Choir Girl’, ‘alone’ and ‘crying like a refugee’, whom, in the novel, Oliver seeks intrepidly to lead ‘down the corridors of healing’ as it were, during the later period of World War I. 

However, the outcome of Oliver’s efforts would appear meagre ultimately, 
in the context of the novel story, perhaps most poignantly owing to the mediocrity and lack of clarity of those times in which he is situated … 
Sounds familiar ?! 

Among other aspects, what I hope to reveal through my account here, 
based around Santayana’s novel, is that there are some iconic situational images, metaphors and referential episodes which potentially translate across socio-cultural situations. 
 
This revelation is accordingly potentially a form of realisation which could be essentially timeless in aspect, yet always pertinent ground for reflection and/or reform … and therefore relevant ground for ‘reflexive’ concern. 

It is such an intensive quest of reflexive awareness and appreciation which forms the ground established through the Deep Friendship series of studies on which I have embarked through the auspices of The Community Project, in affiliation with the United Nations Association of Australia. 

Indeed, the Deep Friendship series serendipitously shares some aspects of the style and approach in situational and interpersonal analysis applied through The Last Puritan. 

Moreover, the various distinctive contributions of the many participants involved in The Community Project over the years have all figured resonantly in this broad ethos of (inter)personal reflection and reform, which has thereby emanated as a focal emphasis of this project. 

It is the broad prospect and purpose of those involved with the project for this interpersonal element of human interaction to become the ground for reflexive reform in the course of time. 

While it is only through open fine-grained analysis of our respective experiential journeys throughout life that such a substantial reflexive endeavour can proceed as a consistent continuous initiative.  

Thence would emerge the prospect of interpersonal amelioration through progressive analysis of the vital meaning, significance, relevance and resonance which forms the context for reform in human relations. 

Cultivated qualities of personal destiny

Personal destiny as realised through ‘the human soul’ is a real and resonant element of life experience for George Santayana (1863-1952).  

Through manifestation as a lived reality, true affection, feeling and memory can be sustained while ‘intuition’ as a true form of essence can be distinguished from mere ‘knowledge’.  

Imagination exists to be cultivated sagaciously.  
While the ‘true nature’ of love and sentiment can constitute the ground of authenticity, as realised through ‘the Good’ in nature and existence.  

Spirit, the ‘emanation’ or source of ‘life’, is realised only through truth.  Authentic love can be realised only through earnest sentiment, otherwise it reverts to a form of blind ‘worship’. 

Providence may be discerned through an ‘intertwined derivation’ which, 
for me, is what constitutes the ground of being, and thence of meaning and significance.  Truly ‘free spirit’ is beyond repentance and exists forever, 
for Santayana.  Because ‘desires and intentions’ are evident among people, ‘a moral world’ pertains to life and experience. 

However, because Santayana could only realise recollections, 
perspectives and sentiment as ‘consolations’ he seemed to lack a broader appreciation of their abiding significance, relevance and resonance as sustainable elements throughout life.  Sensitivity and insight were to be cultivated in this context, but Santayana’s distinctive contribution in this remained somewhat thwarted by the mediocrity of his times.  
What’s new, in many ways !! 

There was ‘… too little wisdom and too much fancy and fashion’ (900) 
Evident, as Santayana observed his contemporary context.  Little seems to have changed in this respect. 

Meanwhile, gradually acquired mutual maturity provides the means through which to transform mere mutual knowledge and/or understanding into broadly resonant attributes or qualities, from my perspective. 

At the outset of The Last Puritan, Santayana reveals through his focal character, Oliver, that ‘romantic equilibrium’ can be developed and sustained through ‘inner blind fortitude’ and ‘faith’ (77).  

Reality constitutes the common existential context through which 
personal experience proceeds, while the ‘Eastern’ perspective of genuine feeling, and the circumstantial element, remains resonant for Oliver.  However, ‘worldliness imposes mediocrity’ (187).  Without ‘faith’ and a broad sense of ‘the tapestry’ of life, ‘what else can good men be [but] … sentimentalists?’ (187).  

Yet it is possible to discern and appreciate a deeper quality, 
facet or attribute of sentiment from my perspective. 

Each ‘natural thing’ is ‘lovely’ (278) – and thereby epitomises 
genuine authenticity for me.  Openness of spirit and expansive magnanimity are vital qualities of character.  

‘Facts … flowered into ideas, into harmonies (312) …’ 
and thereby experience became ‘poetry’ for Oliver (312).  

Prospectively, ‘… the whole pilgrimage of spirit was the only goal of spirit, 
the only home of truth’ (319).  Oliver ‘… was happy in the mere sensation of voyaging (352) …’ or in proceeding with his ‘life journey’ as this would be expressed in our contemporary times.  

Early in the story, the prospect of asserting a resonant spirit of equanimity in the context of the world-weary materiality which prevailed was broadly considered.  It was regarded as propitious, as expressed through the prominent demeanour of Nathaniel Alden, for a person to continuously ‘readjust … to this changing world’ so that ‘feelings’ wouldn’t be 
‘wasted in vapid emotion’ (22). 

Whereas Oliver’s father, Peter Alden, was precocious from a 
‘sentimental aspect’ (51), which clearly differentiated him from Nathaniel, 
his brother.  While the observation was made by Santayana, through the character of Letitia Lamb at this juncture, that while ‘wealth’ is ‘power’ it also therefore incorporates ‘responsibility’ (66). 

Then, as the young Oliver proceeded to tentatively forge out his 
distinctive experience and place in this delicate context, the progression of life served to emphasise a basic element of inherent duality for him.  

‘Every day accentuated the difference between himself and what happened to him.  Living, real, and self-justified was only his own will, the inner spring of his being, the centre and judge of all that unaccountably went on (77) …’ 

Amid this basic dichotomy, Oliver was admonished to ‘… learn to live and to think democratically’, yet only on the pretext of ‘… sharing spontaneously the habits and enthusiasms of his generation … to influence them for the better (112-113) …’ 

Oliver was fascinated with Schopenhauer’s thesis which implied the notion to ‘suspend … Will and see the whole world merely as an Idea’ (132-133).  While happiness was an intuitive phenomenon for him.  ‘… To be happy was to sing; not to be made to sing, or to sing by rote, or as an art, or for a purpose, but spontaneously … Things were [then] truly beautiful (159-160) …’ 

Paradox pervaded superficiality to thereby fortify reality. 

‘… Perhaps when your eyes got used to artificial light, you might run and play about human affairs just as easily as about natural phenomena (160-161) …’ 

Authenticity remained the vital touchstone in all this. 

‘First admit the truth, and then make the best of it.  
That’s a man’s work (165) …’  

While, from this perspective, Peter established a referential challenge for Oliver.  

‘Was obedience to convention and custom and public opinion perhaps only an epidemic slavery, a cruel superstition? (171) … [amid which] America is the worst of influences … It imposes optimism, imposes worldliness, imposes mediocrity (187) …’ 

Although, it is fair to mediate this position by noting that many, 
perhaps even most, people seem to willingly collaborate in this ruse. 

Integrity as the substance of authenticity was affirmed through ‘living up to … fine sentiments’ and thereby ‘acquiring’ them, thence to ‘refine your perceptions’ and ‘purify your motives’ – ‘real life was romantic enough … What story could be more interesting than Oliver’s own experience?’ (199-200).  

Correspondingly, Oliver sought to apply ‘his arsenal of puritan values’ 
in this context – ‘his integrity, his courage, his scorn of pleasure, his material resourcefulness, together with a … sense of alliance with the unseen (225) …’  This situation basically brought forward for him the utilitarian dilemma of realising ‘satisfaction in having done something, no matter what …’; and yet, ‘… wasn’t there anything better … [to] do keenly, clear-mindedly, with one’s whole soul? (226) …’ 

Because, indeed,  ‘… Life itself is a triumph of the soul.  But there are instrumentalities requisite to bring down from heaven the particular happiness of which each soul is capable (254) …’ 

Yet, still Oliver then faced the challenge:  
‘… Why is human conscience so exacting, so impertinent? … how lovely each natural thing could be, if it could be true to itself ! (278) …’  

Thence, from this perspective, what emanates from the authenticity of emotion and feeling is vital: ‘… to trust, maintain and refine the inspirations of the heart – what else was the principle of honour, or that aristocratic liberty, fidelity, and courage (298) …’ 

The imbroglio of perception, feeling and realisation thence was teased into a broadly recognisable form.  

‘Oliver was as quick in intuition as he was deliberate in action and speech (307) … across the miscellany of prosaic information a certain breath of understanding began to blow … facts had flowered into ideas, into harmonies.  The book of experience had become for Oliver a book of poetry (312) … Perhaps the whole pilgrimage of spirit was the only goal of spirit, the only home of truth (319) … Was there anything here but chaos and a welter of impulses (319-320) … Existence was a complication, a commitment, a pose … After all, one’s real self was universal spirit (351-352) … [Oliver] was happy in the mere sensation of voyaging, bearing inexpressibly possibilities locked up somewhere within him (352-353) …’ 

What was most resonant for Oliver in this was the human element.  

For, in the broader context of existence and transcendental humanity, 
there was:  ‘… Nature, truth, God, call it what you will:  that larger inhuman something that surrounded humanity, sustained it, and made it ridiculous (359-360) … we could rise to the happy impersonal spheres of nature and truth only if we had first prudently organised our bodies and our societies, 
so as to have eyes to see and telescopes to help them (360-361) …’ 

Thenceforth, Oliver became somewhat despondent about sentiment.  

‘He didn’t want mementoes of anything; he remembered only too well (367) …’  While,  ‘… At a certain depth he continued to live always in the light of another world, where only such things moved as had touched his heart (379) …’  Then, ‘… all [his immediate circumstances] combined to throw him into a placid reverie, a dream with the eyes open, in which things past and future, jumbled together like figures in a faded tapestry, dim images of spirited scenes, flowed by in procession (398) …’ 

However, Oliver realised astutely in this:  
‘… The vital centre has got to be in one place, not drifting about vaguely and dropping into eight for nine separate places ( 421) …’  While, ‘… there were moments when the intensity of Oliver’s inner life broke through to the surface … [when for Oliver] it was his own spirit that inspired him (438) …’ 

Then Oliver eventually finds himself situated to explore his passionate intuitive discernment and intensity in life through a spirit of love for his cousin, Edith.  Edith restrains his advances, yet her inclination and volition conversely seems to somehow favour prospective involvement with Oliver in a romantic sense – although not to the extent of actually being ‘in love’ (476). 

This is the sheer ‘mystery’ of Edith (465), who is committed to her sense of ‘responsibility’, which derives from her restrained attitude to her ‘beauty’ (467).  Hence, although Edith respects Oliver’s concerted adoration, 
she invokes social convention to temper Oliver’s abundant insistence (478).  She becomes coy in the context of her potential propensity to succumb to Oliver’s love for her (479).  Yet her demeanour turns out to be: ‘… half fleshly weakness, half social affectation … her whole deliberate ambition wedded her to something else, remote from him altogether (480) … 

‘He was too deep for her (488) … He had asked her for herself … 
But he needed ‘love’ (490) …’ 

As Oliver soon discerns and interprets his situation:  
‘… Unless you are something definite to begin with, unless you invincibly love something [or someone] in particular, how are you to distinguish a direction of progress? (513) … even without any exceptional flashes of intuition, by threading and rethreading the labyrinth of his thoughts, he had managed to come to clearness about himself and his duty (560) … I said I was ‘not free’ [to the French Baroness]:  but if something held me back, there must have been something else in me that impelled me forward, something that, if I had been free, would have had full course … Why then not be free? (561) …’ 

Therefore, Oliver is not so much seeking to ‘find himself’ in this, 
in the quasi-‘New Age’ sense, but rather seeking an essential clarity in the context of his situation and circumstances.

Later, when Rose Darnley becomes the focus of Oliver’s attentions and care, she also restrains him.  

A lonely girl,  ‘… In her desolation [Rose] felt a certain cruel superiority; 
she was compensated for all untoward accidents by her inward clearness (572) …’ ‘I am content to live in suspense, in disbelief, in solitude’ Rose declares (576).  Yet she also seems cold and aloof at times, even though she weeps inconsolably when she ultimately realises her haughty treatment of Oliver.  

Nevertheless, Oliver could ultimately confess:  
‘… It is this self-recovery, this self-knowledge, that exalts me … 
[Rose and Edith] may not have been the right women, but they were the right symbols for me then for the thing I needed, for the thing I must find … 
it cannot be any one woman or any one thing (580) …’ 

 

   

Continuity and authentic equanimity – the ground of being

There is evident an essentially providential element in life which forms out from and through an ‘intertwined derivation’, according to Santayana.  Correspondingly, my perspective in this is that such a constant thread of continuity manifest throughout life, reality and existence further constitutes the ground of being through which meaning and significance is derived through interpersonal experience. 

So, for me, it is not only just ‘interesting’ to follow and trace the ‘currents’ and ‘whirlpools’ of life, because there is potent realisable relevance in the ‘arbitrary’ nature of ‘what always happens’.  This may seem, and indeed may be, a form of chaos, but it is paradoxically able to be discerned and deciphered to some extent, perhaps even substantively. 

As reviewed through Santayana’s memoir Persons and Places (1953),
what eventually emanated from his mother’s apparently somewhat hardened, even ‘cold’, disposition in life, and the pragmatic utility of his Bostonian education, was that he eventually became aware his earlier life probably would have been characterised by a certain ‘rich … wild spirit’.  

This would have prevailed given different circumstances with a native Spanish aspect to his education, compatible with his ancestry.  Hence, because each person proceeds throughout life on the basis of ‘desires and intentions’ they derive essentially through their experience, ‘a moral world’ becomes the context through which they develop. 

What Santayana referred to as a ‘truly free spirit’ is beyond repentence but will live forever.  Accordingly, Santayana exhorted each person to cultivate ‘the purity of his art’ as a life endeavour, as everyone has ‘definite gifts’.  

Then art can become life in a corresponding form to which I have cultivated the sense of my work as my life, rather than resigning myself to the compromised perspective of working to live. 

Throughout all his vicissitudes, Santayana retained his basic authentic equanimity, even in the face of the exhausted idea of Christianity, along with the dissipation of the Kultur which emanated from his moral compass for him.  He described this process as more like ‘a bereavement’ through ‘a total change of surroundings for him’.  

So the essential elements of Santayana’s ‘ground’ of being remained in place through this cataclysmic experience for him.  This reality and these moral bearings from his personal perspective seemed to remain in place, although the broad aspect of their meaning, significance and relevance for him were transformed. 

What Santayana revealed most basically and resonantly was that it was possible to elicit the association of religion with ‘the human soul’ such that personal ‘destiny’ could become and remain patently evident and real.  

Such a course through life enabled Santayana to retain true affection, 
feeling and memory as legitimate facets of experience.  He distinguished ‘intuition’ from ‘knowledge’, revealing that ‘essences’ could be ‘freed … 
from the psychological net in which we catch them (882) …’ 

Indeed, Santayana sagaciously extolled the vital resonance of memory and associated feeling, enunciating the crucial paradox that  
‘… Genuine detachment presupposes attachment’ – that to 
‘renounce everything’ having ‘loved nothing’ remains a desolate ideal.  

He realised most pertinently that reality and experience do not constitute some kind of mythical experience ‘to be clarified by a little literary criticism’ (883). 

Santayana recognised a ‘platonic transition’ whereby what is 
‘existent but transitory’ ultimately merges into ‘the eternal’.  

However, he deferred to a predominant notion of ‘fortune’, 
rather than (inter)personal destiny, as the culmination of Providence.  

Hence Santayana seemed to become rather more disillusioned in his later years, when he may have considered himself somewhat less ‘fortunate’.  

He was concerned that there was often too much reliance on the principle of ‘salvation’ in Christianity, to the point where belief in salvation appears ‘pleasing and practical’ (888). 

However, Santayana clearly appreciated most earnestly the ‘true nature’ of love and sentiment in their potential to constitute the ground of authenticity and whatever may be deemed ‘the Good’ in existence, life and experience.  He deeply discerned and appreciated the truly precious elements in life.  ‘Imagination’ existed to be cultivated, yet it could be deceptive. 

Life as nature and spirit exuded different attributes.  

Whereas ‘spirit is an emanation of life’ (891), nature or life ‘is only what the truth affords to the spirit’ (890-891).  An extension of the paradoxical element emerges in all this as it is proposed ‘perfect love is founded on despair’ (891), as it cannot ever be completely realised in this life context.  So love which strays from earnest sentiment can revert simply to ‘worship’.  

The paradox in this then deepens as Santayana reveals that ‘the tragic and the lyrical’ are vital elements of all love, diverse facets to be held together through what I posit as a bountiful spirit of equanimity. 

Because Santayana could only realise or consider recollections, perspectives, and therefore sentiments, as ‘consolations’, he seemed unable to appreciate the abiding significance, and therefore relevance, of these in the broad aspect of his life and experience.  Yet he clearly realised the sheer essential potency of nature through its infusion and effect in the context of humanity. 

Moreover, Santayana was alert to the existence of ‘spirit’ as the essence of the ‘incarnate’ realm, through which it derived expression, and recognised his special place in this.  Further he realised his own distinctive place and significance in cultivating sensitivity and insight as a vocation in discerning the ‘plight’ of this essential spirit as manifested throughout his age and times. 

However, he is blighted in realising the fulfilment and/or culmination of his distinctive contribution in all this in that the mediocrity of his times constricts his agency to convey his vital contribution, and therefore also its potential significance.  Actually, Santayana asserted that ‘… the human world of my time had become the enemy of spirit’ (897) – a situation through which it was even possible for a ‘culture’ to become ‘vicious’ and form destructive ‘habits’.  

Those so situated to assume primary responsibility for this condition regrettably are inclined to respond in reactionary terms, rather than apply basic faculties of authority, substance and depth through their efforts.  Therefore what is prospectively generically significant and relevant in all this tends to elude the inquiry of those concerned.  Hence, Santayana anticipates ‘the great generative order’ (898) as the basic context for further development.  

This prospect serves to engender for me the basic elucidation and appreciation of what can be posited as the authority of tradition as the essential context for continuity in this, along with basic respect for the valid veracity of this element, as is inherent in the work of 
Gilbert Keith Chesterton (1874-1936).  

Consequently, the renewal of a broad-based Intellectual Culture is now imperative, from my perspective, to stem the elitist momentum evident from the legacy of the global mediocrity which Santayana perceptively discerns.  
  
Meanwhile, contemporary artistic enterprise for Santayana revealed 
‘… too little wisdom and too much fancy and fashion (900) …’  

There is meagre room and propensity for the ‘spirit’ element of life, existence and experience to be suitably and feasibly explored and expressed amid all this mediocrity. 

What becomes pertinent for me in this is the propensity of a comprehensive form of mutual maturity, which could emanate from mere mutual knowledge and/or understanding, such that such mutual maturity would transcend these more basic elements to become more of a broad attribute or quality.  
This would be a maturity gradually acquired through incrementally substantial and/or earnest purposeful intensive interaction. 

The quest for truth and values – a personal perceptual journey 

Couched in a trajectory which commences late in the 19th century, 
The Last Puritan initially relates the life experiences of Peter Alden, 
a Bostonian of reasonably wealthy means who proceeds through the years of his youth as an adventurous lad, mostly restrained by his reclusive elder brother, Nathaniel.  There is a form of abiding equanimity in Nathaniel’s resigned approach to life.  While the ethos of Peter’s life-world exudes grudging ‘human respect’ in the context of a perceived ubiquitously hollow ‘universe’. 

Early in the novel the arrogance and insistence of burgeoning ‘American’ cultural colonisation is identified and elucidated.  The inherent influence of this basic element serves to contribute inexorably to the demeanour and attitudes of the novel characters as these form out and are thereby constituted. 

Hence, when Oliver was born, his father Peter Alden, and mother Harriet, were most concerned to invest him with the ‘wealth’ to establish him resolutely in the context of his budding ‘posterity’.  Oliver therefore acquired a form of ‘unstable romantic equilibrium’ in his character and aspect, through which he developed an ‘inner blind fortitude’ as the basis of his abundant ‘faith’.  

As Oliver grew to become most sensitively alert to ‘the difference between himself and what happened to him’, he learned to live ‘real and self-justified’ (77). 

Oliver’s mother ‘froze at the touch of difference’, 
while her ‘moral ideal was … a democracy of the elect’, which for her was the only feasible prospect among ‘people who [are] really alike’ (89).  

While Oliver’s German governess, Irma, encouraged his ‘affectionate’ aspect.  This enabled his ‘routine of life’ to proceed through a ‘plastic’ form, which avoided superficial ‘caprice’ and enabled respect of ‘discipline’ (92).  
Yet this required the containment of emotion. 

Meanwhile, such a personal legacy implied the acceptance of moral leadership through personal ‘material ascendency’ (99).  Oliver acquired a ‘puritan disdain of human weakness and human genius’ (114), while he keenly realised the anomalous paradox of a life of ‘privilege’ whereby ‘something tragic’ and ‘ominous’ pervaded the responsibility of ‘being chosen to lead’ (118).  Hence,  ‘… There was a quiet melancholy in privilege’ (117) 
for Oliver. 

Gradually, Oliver realises how the influence of Providence enables moral qualities and attributes to emanate from everyday common humanity.  

He becomes aware of the potential for reality and ‘the world’ to be appreciated as ‘an Idea’, in the Schopenhauerian sense (132-133).  Even in this context, Oliver realises that, however constrictive it may be, reality still constitutes a common existential context through which personal experience proceeds.  

However, an Eastern perspective in response to generic feeling and the circumstantial aspect of life is redolent for Oliver in this (144).  Amid all this idealism, Oliver’s new-found friend, Jim Darnley, contributes his Anglo-based utilitarian variant: ‘… we British are a practical people.  If we can’t legally punish a man for what he has said, we find him guilty of what he hasn’t done’ (163).  

When Oliver soon joins his father on his yacht, captained by Jim, 
the three adventurers set forth on what proves to be ‘an adventure’ which comprises a journey as much through the realms of philosophy as an oceanic excursion.  Accordingly, the ground of Oliver’s personal perceptual journey in this is a broad search for authentic truth in life and experience.  

What Oliver tends gradually to accept through his personal perspective, as much as does his father, is that ‘human conventions are products of nature’, and hence ultimately ‘morality and religion and science express or protect animal passions’ (181). 

Then when the ascetic Cousin Caleb emerges with his distinctive perspective in this, he notes that ‘worldliness imposes mediocrity’ (187), and that ‘without … Faith’ and with a constrained perspective of ‘the tapestry’ of life ‘what else can good men be [but] … sentimentalists? (187).  Caleb is somewhat scornful of Irma’s notions, describing German philosophy as ‘a play of wilful arbitrary perspectives’ (192). 

After his initial foray into philosophy on the high seas with his father and friend, Oliver anticipates a further more substantive journey, 
realising emphatically by now his ‘puritan virtues – his integrity, his courage, his scorn of pleasure, his material resourcefulness [and] … a sense of alliance with the unseen’ (225).  Through a performance of Hamlet he takes in with Jim, Oliver comes to appreciate ‘philosophy’ as ‘a romantic field into which chivalrous young souls must canter out bravely, to challenge the sinister shadows of failure and death’ (234). 

Meanwhile, Peter arranges a journey to England with Oliver and Jim, 
where ‘everything was arranged for comfort and pleasure [that is, life in England] … [and] only the decent, the concordant, elements had filtered through’ in a life where ‘the truly sweet fruits of existence’ abound:  
these being ‘amusement, kindness and beauty’ (243-244). 

Then, as Oliver is soon to reflect deeply on the substance of the 
Vicar of Iffley’s sermons, during his sojourn in England, he remains alert to his realisation thenceforth that it is impossible for any one person to be the epitome of ‘all the virtues’ in life (254).  

Sharing with the Vicar, Oliver’s spirit is vitalised through a sense of deep enabling.  

‘What a revelation that there might be in the world, 
in places and persons untouched by the world, lives in which only nature, 
only religion, only friendship, were real’ (258) if those involved could sustain this resonant quest for values throughout life.

Consequently, it becomes evident for Oliver he will be obliged to ‘choose’ which virtue(s) would be most resonant for him.  The aspect of nature epitomises generic authority in life because each ‘natural thing’ is ‘lovely’ in that it can be true to itself (278). 

So it is through the abundance of openness in spirit and expansive magnanimity, for each other and the universe, that true reconciliation prevails.  

‘Yet we should be reconciled even to all this wasted affection and this hostility at cross-purposes.  We should love and forgive everybody as we love and forgive ourselves’, Oliver proclaims (285-286). 

Thence Oliver becomes aware of how substantially he is acquiring moral integrity and authenticity as his experience of life deepens inexorably.  
‘Images fell into groups and invited the imagination to piece them out … 
facts had flowered into ideas, into harmonies (312) …’  

Experience becomes ‘poetry’ for Oliver (312).   

Through an extensive and intensive heart-to-heart episode of deep interpersonal sharing, Peter also conveys a candid insight from the fruits of his experience to this time.  

The pervasive element of paradox becomes luminous in Peter’s trenchant declaration that:  ‘England … never has understood itself:  it exists by a living compromise between incompatible tendencies.  We in America are simpler’ (313) !!  Clearly, the essence of this general demeanour seems to have remained basically consistently in place !  While ‘love of purity’ for itself rather than utilitarian ‘calculation’ is the essence of the Puritan spirit for Oliver (318).  ‘Perhaps the whole pilgrimage of spirit was the only goal of spirit, the only home of truth.’ (319) 

Thence Oliver proceeds to apply such a universal principle in more of an intimate personal sense.  

‘Existence was a complication, a commitment, a pose (351) …   

‘Of course, to play the game you must follow the rules:  
but why this game, or these rules?  And why play at all? … He was perfectly content to be this person and play his part (351) … After all, one’s real self was universal spirit (351-352) … 

‘He was happy in the mere sensation of voyaging … 
the spirit of the action and the manner of it would transfigure anything.  

‘The point was … to be vowed to defend and exalt the beautiful in all things, to be the champion of tenderness, of honesty, of liberty (352-353) …’ 

While the aspect of our humanity remains vibrantly resonant in this for Oliver.  

‘… There might be no better way to their hearts than gifts and the prospect of gifts.  Yet they had hearts (354) … Our whole human world was horribly second class (360) … Might it not be that we were all in reality upon a pilgrimage? (361) …’ 

As Oliver’s appreciation of human nature forms out, 
he comes to consider friendship as mere ‘boyish sentiment’; while ‘charity’, as the ‘tenderness of maturity and disillusion’, is pre-eminent in character (365).  

Correspondingly, Oliver claims to be ambivalent about sentiment at this early time of his life.  ‘He didn’t want mementoes of anything; he remembered only too well.’ (367)  

Even so, the presumable fundamentals of life are vividly evident for him, despite his own distinctive sense of personal distance from these.  

‘What is love-making? … it’s a part of life, 
and it’s no use trying to live on principles contrary to nature.  You must go in for existence blindly, before you know what will come of it.’ (374)  

Yet,  ‘… At a certain depth he continued to live always in the light of another world, where only such things moved as had touched his heart’ (379).  

‘Among these was the care of his cousins, Edith and Mario, 
throughout his erstwhile convalescence from a football injury.  ‘It meant a lot.  Perhaps not to them – they are so full of flighty affections – but it meant a lot to me.  It means here at last are my natural friends (400) …’ 

Meanwhile, at other times, still in his youth, Oliver could be bluntly facetious.  

‘If men had no imagination they could feel no discouragement (414).  

‘Perhaps all this religion and philosophy and poetry and art were a disease to be killed off presently by natural selection.’ (414)  

Taking up residence in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s former quarters at Divinity Hall, Harvard, Oliver confidently asserts:  ‘What was good for Emerson is good enough for me’ (416).  At this time, the principles of consistency, stability and balance are Oliver’s primary touchstones.  ‘The movement is elastic and naturally finds its balance’ (422), Oliver observed of rowing. 

Mario’s attitude to study is much more grounded.  

‘Ethics [is] intensely cultivating … 
[But] I’ve come here to read books and learn facts … not to cultivate sentiment.  If the facts are before a man, he will know well enough how to feel about them (431) …’  The prevalent discourse then was ‘… all a chaos of talk, of argument, of opinion.  Babel:  everyone quite sure, and nobody really knowing what he was talking about (437) …‘  Sounds familiar ?!!  
What’s new ?!! 

Yet Oliver’s ultimate essential equanimity shines through in all this.  

‘Yet there were moments when the intensity of Oliver’s inner life broke through to the surface … It was not the spirit of Plato, nor of Emerson, 
his predecessor in that student’s chamber, that now [or ‘then’] descended on Oliver:  it was his own spirit that inspired him (438) …’  While equanimity and authenticity are abundant in his Aunt Caroline’s quip that  ‘… Nature would be kind enough to us if we quietly consented to be natural’ (456). 

Then Cousin Edith becomes the focus of Oliver’s attention.  

‘She put you at your ease (462).  

‘Her good sense, her tact, her sympathy produced a feeling of safety … euphoria … you felt you were moving on a lighter plane than your own, 
more resolutely excluding everything inferior, and yet more comprehensive in outlook, surer in the knowledge of the world (462) … 

Her complexion, her form, her movements, seemed altogether transfigured into something dreamlike and higher than human (479) …’ 

Edith’s perspective is that ‘everything is a mystery’ and ‘we must have faith … being beautiful is … an added responsibility’ in life (465, 467).  

‘Mustn’t love, when it is real, be always different from what it was before?’ (473) she asks Oliver sagaciously.  Clearly Edith appreciates Oliver deeply.  ‘… Your way of feeling about love and marriage is so much finer than that of most young men, so much holier … Your feelings seem to be in one way very deep and well-reasoned:  but have you ever been ‘in love’? (476) … 

‘A sort of impulse ran through [Edith’s] mind to play Venus to this puritan Adonis.  But the temptation was momentary.  Her critical faculty, her social standards, at once asserted themselves (477) …’  Yet she respects and reveres Oliver, in some sense, which ‘might turn to love’ (478) … 

‘My dear Oliver’ she said in a tone of perfect serenity and impartial perception of the truth, ‘you are a rare being.  You see into one’s heart, and you have a spiritual discernment (478) …’ 

Meanwhile, for Oliver:  
‘… Wasn’t Edith as approachable as ever?  … Didn’t he on several occasions snatch a kiss; and though she said ‘Don’t’, and went on talking about other things, wasn’t it certain that she was not displeased?  … wasn’t it to him she looked for understanding? (480) … 

‘Edith’s friendliness … was half fleshly weakness, half social affectation … 
her whole deliberate ambition wedded her to something else, remote from him altogether … Her religion was simply her overloaded way of feeling and talking … Something precious seemed essential to a beautiful woman (480) …’  While, for Oliver, ‘… self consciousness in him, as in so many philosophers, intercepted intuition (480) …’  Yet, Oliver couldn’t seem to prove himself and his love for Edith.  ‘… He was too deep for her (488) …’ 

Edith responded:  
‘… I care for you very much, and more the more I see of you … The right path for you may be a rugged and lonely one; yet we may find in the end, perhaps in another life, that our different ways have brought us together (489) …’  Hence, ‘… the beautiful divine Edith had strangely evaporated.  He had never asked her for ideas, for intellectual guidance.  He had asked her for herself … But he needed ‘love’ (490) …’ 

Essentially, Oliver seeks a form of unity through truth.  

‘There was, there couldn’t help being, a single supreme allegiance, 
a dedication to truth, to mercy, to beauty, infinitely to be preferred to this motley experience and this treadmill of bitter amusements (509) …’  

While what prevailed, certainly in the Germanic sense, 
was ‘… this flow of theory, [which] while it carried any amount of learning in its controversial currents, was absolutely arbitrary in its direction (509) … 

‘To enlighten desire; to pick up the thread of salvation in this labyrinth of folly; to discern the causes of heathen bewilderment and the contrary principles of a pure life, wasn’t that what Buddha and Lao Tse had done, but too soberly for the rabble (510) … 

‘Unless you are something definite to begin with, 
unless you invincibly love something in particular, how are you to distinguish a direction of progress? … In this air their was a placid tension, like the tension of truth; and this repose was only the equilibrium, at their centre, of all disputes and of all troubles … fearless reason [was pleasant] if you were loyal at heart to your traditions (513) … This would not be a sentimental compromise between the world and the spirit or between tradition and truth; 
it would be an acceptance of both, each in its unvarnished reality … an order itself kind (514) … Art must canalise nature, present disastrous inundations, and render those abundant waters navigable and sweet (515) …’ 

Then, at the outbreak of World War I, Mario interposes on the deep equanimity of Oliver’s trajectory of reflection.  

‘Your philosophy requires you to find a reason for everything (524) … 

‘Do you know what you are living for?  Are you sure it’s all worthwhile?  
It just happens (524)’ … ‘And what will you have instead [of governments]?’ Oliver thence challenges him.  ‘… Soldiers, Cardinals, and engineers, people who know something in their own line, experts, administrators, and poets … Perhaps this war will bring us our natural leaders again (525) …’ is Mario’s reply.  ‘… Oliver began to think it all, all this worldliness and optimism, flaunted by a profound, an incurable mediocrity (527) … institutions and ideas are always changing; by dying to preserve one set you will be creating another:  and there will be less that you could care for in the world after you than there was before (534) …’ 

While, when his close friend and confidante, Jim Darnley, 
dies at sea having enlisted in the Navy, Oliver reflects:  ‘It almost looks as if what has happened now, and what I ought to be feeling now, had been conveyed to me [before] by a vivid premonition (529) …’  

Then, ‘… how should it be possible to do good when you haven’t discerned ‘the good’, or to abolish injustice when you’re not sure what would be just, or to diffuse happiness when you haven’t tasted it? (540) …’ 

Throughout the later stages of the War, Irma suffers immensely, 
given her Germanic background.  

‘Oliver himself tried to comfort her, to reassure her (542).  

‘He praised the Germans, acknowledged how faithfully they had carried out the maxims of their philosophy:  the categorical imperative, and the will to dominate; how manfully they had risen to what they believed was the call of Providence.  But all this glory was impossible without enemies (542) …’ 

Meanwhile, Oliver ‘… demanded something to build upon, sound principles and sure possessions … Nothing existed for him save that which his moral tentacles were ready to seize (552) …’  Then, in response to the 
Baronne du Bullier’s offer of romance, Oliver reflects:  ‘… As to love, the troubles of the times drove all thought of it from his mind, and in any case he was not free’ … ‘Let it be as you please … You are too serious for me (557) …’ the Baronne then eventually responds.  

Oliver thence ponders his way through to personal clarity in all this: 
‘… even without any exceptional flashes of intuition, by threading and rethreading the labyrinth of his thoughts, he had managed to come to clearness about himself and his duty … ‘I wasn’t free … it’s my own will [that holds me back] (560) …’ 

Rose Darnley, whom Oliver gradually came to love while at Iffley, 
then seeks to weave her essentially pragmatic perspective amid all that is happening for Oliver:  

‘My dear Oliver … you are dreaming (568).  

‘You can never come back here, to the Iffley you have known (568) … 

‘The influences that led you to think of me and seemed to lend me a certain place in your life, to make me as it were inevitable, have all ceased forever.  What am I, what can I ever be, to you, in myself, apart from that setting?  Nothing (569) … You wouldn’t be without a function in the world … if you could understand the world or even yourself (571) … She was sure his embrace was deliberate … As a young lover he was too ridiculous … 
[While] In her desolation she felt a cruel superiority (572) …’ 

Yet Oliver is persistent.  

‘I am not strong enough alone (573) … It is you that must be my best friend, and the dearest (574) … You are a marvellous creature, so perfect, so serene, so intelligent, such absolute adamant (575) …’  

Rose is consolatory in her response.  

‘Oliver, what you say is practical, kind, chivalrous (576).  

‘But … I can’t warm you because I am cold (576) … 

‘I am content to live in suspense, in disbelief, in solitude (576) … 

‘It is nothing to be chosen, or put on a pedestal, 
or introduced into a program of life.  That is sentimentality or at best partnership.  Love is something else; and to be worthwhile it must be happy love, natural, irresistible, unreasoning love’ (576). 

Consequently, Oliver relents from his passion.  

‘… The strain is relaxed … I am falling back upon my deeper self (579) … [Rose and Edith] may not have been the right women, but they were the right symbols for me then for the thing I needed, for the thing I must find (580) … 

‘At bottom it can’t be any one woman or any one thing (580).  

‘It must be all perfections and all beauties and all happiness (580) … 

‘Now affection and kindness are all that I have ever felt or ought to feel about the real Rose, or about the real Edith … but where I have added a touch of love … then I was … seeing … only an image … of my own aspiration … [which] in being detached from their accidental persons, will be clarified in itself (580) … 

‘The idea of a divine being … is like my false Edith or my false Lord Jim [Darnley], a mirage … an impossible object.  Granted, yet the falser the object is, the stronger and clearer must have been the force in me that called it forth and compelled me to worship it.  It is this force in myself that matters:  to this I must be true … I was born a moral aristocrat, able to obey only the voice of God, which means that of my own heart (581) … We will not accept anything cheaper or cruder than our own conscience.  We have dedicated ourselves to the truth, to living in the presence of the noblest things we can conceive … Either the truth or nothing (582) …’  

Yet,  ‘… Every human achievement is submerged in the general flood of things, and its issue soon grows ambiguous and untraceable (584) …’, according to the story narrator. 

When Oliver eventually passes away most tragically in a motor accident, immediately after the War, Mario returns to Iffley to explain the terms of Oliver’s legacy to Rose and Mrs Darnley. 

Meanwhile, admitting that Oliver ‘… show[ed] himself to be absolutely unselfish and magnanimous (587) …’ Rose then seeks to explain her situation with him from her perspective.  ‘… He liked to deceive himself into thinking he was in love with me … I should have failed sadly in my function if I hadn’t also protected him against myself (589) …’  Then, when Mrs Darnley responds with  ‘… Nobody ever will [love you].  You are too cold and haughty’ … 
Rose had left the room, not to be seen in tears (589) …’ 

Meanwhile, Mario is alert to the deeper sensitivity of this situation.  

‘ ‘I am afraid your daughter had a deeper attachment to our friend than she likes to confess.  Her sarcasms are only a feint to conceal her feelings (589).  

‘I am truly sorry (589).  

‘There must have been some misunderstanding between them (589).  

‘When people are reserved by nature their words often do their hearts an injustice (589) … when I was at Iffley Court … I thought she showed signs beneath her calm caustic exterior, and in spite of her youth, of having a deeply womanly nature (590) …’ 

Then, soon after, when Rose was persistent in taunting him, 
Mario declares that he ‘… was amazed at the indifference, at the ingratitude of these women … The manners of the future.  You may … make no pretence of feeling what you don’t feel (591) …’  Mario seeks to clarify the situation.  ‘… How unfair you women are !  We all adore you, we hang on your least wishes, we are your slaves for life.  We can’t help it … And then … you grudge us … our poor melancholy old friendships !  … Poor Oliver … kept revising himself, and never considered that if he had allowed himself to be as he naturally was, he would have been perfect … When was there ever such sweetness and integrity? (592) … 

‘Vanny [Mario] had a great tolerance for human frailty, 
and a positive love for variety of temperaments, especially in women (592) … Yet that evening he was profoundly surprised and aggrieved at the reception he had met with.  What could have attached Oliver to this family, that proved so unworthy of his affection? … Strange proud girl [Rose]; no heart; couldn’t possibly bring herself to love anybody, and was desperate in consequence … She is good-looking, she is intelligent – too intelligent.  For a country girl, she is strangely distinguished (593) … Her lover ought to adore her, or at least to admire and venerate her as poor Oliver did.  But I know she’s just like other women at bottom, only she walks on stilts … Meantime, at Hawthorne Lodge [after Mario left], Rose … didn’t restrain her emotions (594) …’ 

Phased awareness – streams of meaning and significance

‘Fatalism’ as a prospective life principle is diminished while ‘Providence’ is extolled by George Santayana in Persons and Places (870).  

He recognises the abundant conventional Glasgow influence of his mother, and Bostonian influence of his father, as the predominant elements which emerged ‘to catechise [his] young mind’ (870).  Yet he could distinguish an evident inherent pattern in all this. 

Basically, Santayana proceeds from the perspective that 
‘… accidents are accidents only to ignorance’ (870).  Hence, ‘in reality all physical events flow out of one another by a continuous intertwined derivation’. 

As Santayana sets forth on his broad ‘retrospective voyage’, he observes:  ‘What we call the laws of nature are hasty generalisations’ (870).  Consequently, it becomes crucial to affirm a substantial ‘ground’ of being and experience in the context of (inter)personal life. 

Santayana is most eloquent in explaining the process of phased awareness through which insight and intuition form inexorably into streams of meaning and significance through the context of contemporary contingencies, thereby offsetting the groundswell of generalisation.  

‘Yet in the turbid stream of nature there are clear stretches, 
and traceable currents; and it is interesting to follow the beginnings and the developments of a run here and a whirlpool there …’ (870) 

Therefore, Santayana espouses his intrepid analysis in this, 
as he proceeds to challenge the very intervention of any fundamental element in this context: ‘… nothing could be at bottom more arbitrary than what always happens …’ (870) 

However, on behalf of his grandfather, Jose Borras, 
who faced the ‘unsettling times’ of French occupation in Spain as an advocate of the French Revolution, Santayana proposes that in 1823 
‘… his [grandfather’s] thirst for exploration or his longing for a simpler and more ideal society carried him eventually across the Atlantic to rural, republican, distinguished, Jeffersonian Virginia.  Here, if anywhere, mankind had turned over a new leaf, and in a clean new world, free from all absurd traditions and tyrant mortgages, [he] was beginning to lead a pure life of reason and virtue (873) …’ 

This situation worked out well for a time until his grandfather received a diplomatic post in Barcelona, thence to return to Spain, where George’s mother lived for her early years. 

Later, Santayana’s mother returned to Boston, after she parted from her husband, owing primarily to disparity in their respective employment situations.  He describes his mother, with whom he lived throughout his formative years, in terms which seem indicative of a perhaps depressed, 
or at least melancholic, disposition.  

‘Her real attachments, apart from her devotion to her father, were to her women friends, not to crowds of them, but to two or three and for life (876).  

‘To men as men, even to her two husbands she seems to have been cold, critical and sad, as if conscious of yielding to some inevitable but disappointing fatality (876) …’  

This then culminated in the tone, ambience, and ultimately the context, 
for Santayana’s education.  

‘Education such as I received in Boston was steadier and my associations more regular and calmer than they would have been in Spain; but there was a terrible moral chill, a pettiness and practicality of outlook and ambition, which I should not have encountered amid the complex intrigues of a Spanish environment (877) …’  All of which formed the basic context through which Santayana speculated on what would have been the consequence of a Spanish education: ‘… then I should have become a different man; so that my father’s decision was all for my good, if I was to be the person that I am now (877) …’  

As Santayana speculated on the fruits of ‘a wild spirit’, 
those so blessed through such a ‘philosophy might harmlessly change at every moment’ with frequent and radical change culminating in 
‘an inexhaustibly rich experience’ (877).  However, he earlier had developed in the ambience of the ‘antiquity’ of ‘Avila’ (877, 878).  

Consequently, he realised ‘the past … not as a vain dream … 
but as an experience and a lesson still applicable to a moderately stable world’ (878).  While in this world are ‘other living bodies’, similar to us, 
whose ‘actions and gestures’ through mimicry ‘suggest … desires and intentions’ which animate them (878).  Hence ‘… a moral world, practical and social … become(s), for our imagination, the theatre of our action …’ (878) 

However,   ‘… A truly free spirit will never repent; he cannot revert to his true self, since he has no particular self to revert to ... He must will everything, 
do everything and suffer everything, but his spirit can never die’ (878). 

Further, Santayana’s ‘difficult relations to persons and places’ as 
‘clearly imposed facts … caused me to feel that I lived in a kind of solitude (879) … 

‘My preferences were clearly mocked and out of harmony with my surroundings and, as I soon felt, with my times’ (879), as he put this. 

Through ‘conceit’ and firm ‘disposition’ Santayana stayed true to his ‘allegiances’, not to follow the majority.  ‘Nor did I feel any impulse to contradict or blame them … but I preferred solitude (879) … I might wish to change my surroundings and my way of living; I never undertook to change myself (879) …’  

Accordingly, everyone has ‘inevitable limitations and definite gifts; 
but that which marks progress in his life is the purity of his art; I mean, 
the degree to which his art has become his life, so that the rest of his nature does not impede or corrupt his art, but only feeds it (879).’ 

There was a place for innovation and aspiration in the resilience of life as continuous existence and experience.  

While, ‘… unlike madmen, good prophets proclaim new ideas that the world can be led to take seriously and to weave into its conventions (880) …’ Santayana proposed. 

Then he explained how the blessing, or Providence, of this attribute became evident through the essence of form and idea for him.  

‘I have said how my youthful piety was accompanied by an equal delight in geography and architecture.  I had little real contact with any of these things, but pure delight in the form and idea of them (880) …’ 

Meanwhile, the erosion of Christianity as a dominant universal ethos certainly didn’t impede Santayana’s pervasive personal equanimity: ‘… this intellectual catastrophe would also involve a moral one, in that it implied the exhaustion of an inspiration, the decay of a Kultur … The idea of such a catastrophe caused no revolution in myself; it was more like a bereavement or a total change of surroundings … All that happened was that I became accustomed to a different Weltanschauung, to another system having the same rational function of religion:  that of keeping me attentive to the lessons of life’ (880). 

Insightfully as ever, Santayana was able to discern the association of religion with ‘the human soul’ such that personal destiny may be realised.  

Such realisation then further allowed him to range across and through various belief systems in deriving his ‘vital philosophy’ (881).  

‘Each religion, by the help of more or less myth which it takes more or less seriously, proposes some method of fortifying the human soul … enabling it to make its peace with its destiny … I had, and have, such a vital philosophy; and the movement of my mind among various systems of belief has tended merely to discover how far my vital philosophy could be expressed in each of them (881). 

Consequently, Santayana was relieved of any external compunction to restrain affection or any associated experience, feeling, or memory, of this.  

‘My variations therefore never involved rejecting any old affection, 
but only correcting [or refining] such absoluteness or innocence as there may have been about it, and reducing it to its legitimate function (881) …’ 

Hence Santayana could quip in visionary pertinence:  
‘Religion was poetry intervening in life (!!) (881) …’ 

However, thence asserting ‘the world’ only ‘belongs’ to him as an ‘idea’ 
(881, 882), Santayana differentiated ‘intuition from knowledge’ (882), thereby interposing a dichotomy in this context, as ‘in old age’ he claimed to have ‘… freed ‘essences’ from the psychological net in which we catch them, and distinguished intuition from knowledge (882) …’ 

While in his youth, Santayana realised the inadequacy of freedom and inconstancy as a combined working ideal: ‘… without setting my heart on anything the point was to enjoy everything with a free mind … This was a petty programme (883) ...’  For soon he sagaciously discerned the really resonant paradox, even irony, of so-called ‘attachment’, along with the resonance of memory and feeling associated with this, for instance.  

‘Genuine detachment presupposes attachment (883).  

‘What can it signify for you to say that you renounce everything, 
if as yet you have loved nothing? (883) …’  

Because ultimately the substance of life beams through in the true relevance and resonance of stark authenticity.  

‘The world is not a myth, to be clarified by a little literary criticism (883).  

‘It envelops our substance with a kindred substance immensely more voluminous (883) …’ 

Yet clearly advanced age seemed to diminish Santayana’s capacity to appreciate, value and apply the fruits of Providence, and thereby realise his destiny.  

‘Fortune has become indifferent to me except as fortune might allow me to despise fortune and to live simply in some beautiful place.  I have cut off all artificial society, reducing it to the limits of sincere friendship and intellectual sympathy (884) …’ 

Santayana discerned a form of ‘philosophic insight’ which forms out as a ‘transition’ which he calls ‘metanoia’, through which material existence is synthesised into the eternal realm.  ‘… The platonic transition was therefore at once spontaneous and inevitable, from the many to the one, from the existent but transitory to the eternal (885) …’  What alerted him to this, among other experiences, was the phenomenon of his young students, as his ‘friends’, 
as ‘every year’, with each new intake of students, they became ‘younger and younger, more and more standardised and generic (885) …’

Hence in reference to ‘love’ in the context of ‘the world’, 
Santayana could proclaim:  ‘Listen to reason … Let your heart rather follow its true object where that object is gone into eternity (886).’  

So certainly ‘eternity’ as such was a real and present dimension for Santayana.  Correspondingly, he regretted the culmination of his sister’s journey through life – the person with whom he was most closely associated.  

‘Why then did she manage to displease and dishearten me? (886)  

‘Because it seemed, in such unfavourable circumstances, an act of desperation on her part, a redoubled proof of her weakness (886-887) … 

‘She still clung to the Church with an intense party spirit, which she developed also in politics; but she couldn’t live her religion as I lived my philosophy.  It was too unreal for her human nature (887).’ 

Therefore, Santayana ventured to the ground of what constitutes ‘salvation’ as the means through which the metanoia or transformation from the existential (‘material) to the eternal realm for Santayana was realised.  

‘In Christianity the idea of prosperity is abandoned for that of salvation in the world to come … The question is whether the paraphernalia of salvation are not in all cases accidental, sometimes pleasing and practical, sometimes dangerously superstitious (888) …’  

So Santayana thence relegated real promotive progressive destiny to the vagaries of fate and chance from every feasible perspective.  

‘I was driven from the temporal to the eternal, 
not by any one crisis or conjunction of events, but by the very nature of existence, when this had been honestly faced and frankly admitted (885) …’ 

The compromised spirit of being marginalised was ever emphatically evident for Santayana.  

‘I was a teacher of philosophy in the place where philosophy was most modern, most deeply Protestant, most hopefully new ! (889) …’  

This inevitably meant his orthodox Catholic spirit was constricted.  

‘I would never be, I will not say a leader, 
but even a happy participator in the intellectual faith of my neighbours (880).  

Yet, he could clearly value and appreciate the quality of pure noble substantial sentiment through authentic equanimity: ‘… it is dishonourable and 
self-contradictory to forswear your honest loves, past or present.  They it is that reveal your true nature and its possible fulfilments; they are the Good, in the modes of it that you can appreciate and unfeignedly worship (889) …’ 

Ultimately, Santayana broached and realised the persistence and perpetuity of all that is truly precious in life and experience.  

‘No part of time is lost in eternity, only the haste and uncertainty of passing from one thing to another … my heart … had said to me:  

‘Cultivate imagination, love it, give it endless forms, 
but do not let it deceive you … live freely among ideas.  To possess things and persons in idea is the only pure good to be got out of them (890) …’ 

Santayana well recognised that life and spirit manifest and retain different attributes as the epitome of their nature.  

‘I know very well that this philosophic salvation is not such as nature or life looks for or can accept; it is only what the truth affords to the spirit (890).  

‘Life and nature do not ask to be saved from themselves:  
they ask only to run at full tilt (890-891) … spirit is an emanation of life (891) …’ 

As he proceeded to clarify his self-stated ‘condensed and rhetorical … paradox’, Santayana observed:  ‘A perfect love is founded on despair (891)… 

‘It is not love simply, but only ‘perfect’ love that includes despair (891).  

‘Love in itself includes hope, or at least a desire to preserve the object of it, 
to enshrine and defend it (891) …’ 

If love were to forget the epitome of its substance, 
expressed through earnest sentiment, it could tend to revert to ‘worship’, through which its authenticity and equanimity could be gradually forsaken.  

‘It is … psychologically not only possible but normal for the passion of love to be self-forgetful, and to live on in the very act of sacrifice and personal despair.  So transformed, the great passion becomes worship (892) …’ 

It is the vital spirit of equanimity which holds the most diverse facets of Love, and which thereby substantiates and supports its culmination.  

‘Combine these two elements, the tragic and the lyrical, and you have turned love into a rapture in adoration which seems to me its perfection (892) …’ 

The glorious paradox through which love thence proceeds to its most radical expression is characterised by the Jungian-like splendour of the distinctive facets of love.  ‘… The passion of love … is essentially the spiritual flame of a carnal fire that has turned all its fuel into light (892) …’ 

Santayana valued deeply ‘recollections’ which he called ‘magnificent’, 
and which were clearly most precious for him.  

‘I keep only some old miniature or some little perspective that caught my eye in passing (892-893) … Those were free glimpses of the world that I could love and could carry away.  They are my consolations (893) …’ 

Consequently, Santayana was obliged to settle for an interpretation of these precious memories as only ‘consolations’, rather than most ‘significant’ episodes in the whole life-world of experience and beyond.  

‘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, with prudence, in innumerable ways; a conviction that everything ever since has confirmed (893) …’  While:  ‘… The vastness and violence of nature, 
in challenging and often decimating mankind, by no means tends to dehumanise it (893) …’ 

The essential ‘Robinson Crusoe’ image here of a somewhat reluctant pioneer and cultivator resonated in all this for me personally.  

‘The spirit in me felt itself cast upon this social and political world like Robinson Crusoe upon his island.  We were both creatures of the same Great Nature (894) …’  Yet:  ‘… In its social and political structure … my world was more like Crusoe’s energetic person; for my island was densely inhabited (894) …’ 

Most intuitively, Santayana discerned the complicity of ‘spirit’ as essence realised through the ‘incarnate’ realm, and yet appreciated the paradox of the distinctive nature of spirit being expressed in this way.  

‘This is the double conflict, the social opposition and the moral agony, 
that spirit suffers from being incarnate; and yet if it were not incarnate it could not be individual, with a situation in space and time, a language and special perspective over nature and history:  indeed, if not incarnate, spirit could not exist at all or be the inner light and perpetual witness of life in its dramatic vicissitudes (894-895) …’ 

Accordingly, Santayana realised his ‘special’ distinctive place and contribution in the context of this constellation of spirit and the material realm.  

‘If it be the fate of all spirit to live in a special body and a special age, and yet, for its vocation and proper life, to be addressed from that centre to all life and all being, I can understand why I have been more sensible to this plight and to this mission than were most of my contemporaries (895) …’  While he also recognised the substantial grounding of his place amid the potential superficiality and relativity of his age.  ‘The times also were moving, rapidly and exultingly, towards what for me was chaos and universal triviality (895) …’ 

Then Santayana developed the vibrant metaphor of himself as a guest of his Host, the world, as a prospective pertinent analogy of all (inter)personal life experience.  

‘The world was My Host; I was a temporary guest in his busy and animated establishment.  We met as strangers; yet each had generic and well-grounded ideas of what could be expected of the other (895) …’  Further to which the ubiquitous irrepressible influence of utilitarian ideology intervenes.  
‘… We might prove mutually useful (895) …’  

Yet Providence, and hence whatever is providential, 
mediates all this activity and so-called ‘utility’.  It is here that the palpable element of authentic equanimity is vitally evident.  

‘The guest has no right to demand what is not provided (896).  

‘He must be thankful for any concessions that may be made to his personal tastes, if he is tactful and moderate in his requirements, pays his bills promptly and gives decent tips [!] (896) …’ 

While, again, authentic equanimity prevails in this.  

‘Having lived a peaceful independent life, free from hardship and misfortune, 
I have found it easy to conform externally with the mechanism of society … Any common surroundings and any commonplace people pleased me well enough (896) … 

‘Then I discovered how much the human world of my time had become the enemy of spirit and therefore of its own light and peace (897) …’ 

How Santayana explained this phenomenon was grounded in the material realm, rather than in religion as spirituality.  

‘Not at all, as lovers of antiquity or of the Middle Ages seem to think, 
because of mechanical inventions or natural sciences or loss of Christian faith … Variety in cultures is not due to aberrations … But there may be aberration in any species or any culture when it becomes vicious; that is when it forms habits destructive of its health and of its ability to prosper in its environment (897) …’ 

Yet there always seemed to be some mandatory compromise to the substance of prevalent values in this.  

‘Though there was no longer any dignity in manners or much distinction in costume, fashion had not lost all its charm (897) …’  Santayana described 
‘the Intellectuals’ of his time as a cosmopolitan circle … no less subject to fashion and to ironical gossip’ (897), among whom public opinion became the primary pervasive rationale.  ‘… Leaders and busybodies must obey their own momentum.  A personal reaction on what other people say is socially sufficient; it will do for the press; and it will corroborate the critic’s opinion in his own eyes’ (898). 

The problem here is a basic lack of authority, 
substance and depth in what is raised as significant and relevant.  

‘I cannot overcome the settled distrust of merely intellectual accomplishment, militant in the void.  I prefer common virtues and current beliefs, even if intellectually prejudiced and simple, when the great generative order of nature has bred them, and lent them its weight and honesty.  

This is basically why a renewed Intellectual Culture established through a broad-based ethos, is required to address the elitist momentum which prevails in our socio-cultural development and its antecedents. 

Santayana’s stark perspective was that:  
‘… The contemporary world has turned its back on the attempt and even on the desire to live reasonably.  The two great wars (so far) of the twentieth century were adventures in enthusiastic unreason.  They were inspired by unnecessary and impracticable ambitions; and the ‘League’ and the 
‘United Nations’, feebly set up by the victors, were so irrationally conceived that they at once reduced their victory to a stalemate (899) …’  

The broad principles through which Santayana thence appealed for ‘rational’ living were later echoed through the work of Michel Foucault.  

‘I think the conditions [for living rationally] may be reduced to two:  
First, self-knowledge, the Socratic key to wisdom; and second, 
sufficient knowledge (899) …’  Or substantial knowledge, from my perspective.  ‘You may say that the proletariat knows its interests perfectly; they are to work less and earn more (899) …’, these being principles also examined through Alain de Botton’s analysis of contemporary culture and values. 

‘Those are indeed its interests so long as it remains a proletariat; 
but to be a proletariat is an inhuman condition … There must be freedom of movement and vocation.  There must be Lebensraum for the spirit (899) …’ rather than the much more narrowly conceived basic Hitlerian edict of physical/ material ‘living space’ for a specific racial denomination. 

Conversely, ‘… the great body … [of] proletariat’ sinking into 
‘… cities [is] made possible by the concentration of trade and the multiplication of industries, modernised, and swelling into monopolies … 
a certain nucleus of self-preserving instincts and habits, a normal constitution of society … they are civilised (900) …’ 

Accordingly, contemporary ‘arts’ for Santayana reveal 
‘… too little wisdom and too much fancy and fashion (900) …’ as evident through ‘… manners, dress, poetry, and philosophy from the middle ages to our day.  Civilisation had become more enterprising, plastic and irresponsible … Intellectual chaos and political folly could thus come to coexist strangely with an irresistible dominance of mechanical industry.  The science that served this industrial progress by no means brought moral enlightenment (901) …’ 

However, it was ‘the dream of the moderns, 
on which I found My Host boastfully running his establishment’ (901) 
in Santayana’s time, with scientific endeavour and/or progress as the optimal aspiration.  

This situation should, and/or could, be otherwise.  

‘He [Santayana’s Host] expected his guests also to act accordingly and to befuddle and jollify one another, so that all should convince themselves that they were perfectly happy and should advertise their Host’s business wherever they went.  Such forced enterprise … was all artificial and strained, mocking the inhuman domination of some militant class or sect (901).  

‘This society lacked altogether that essential trait of rational living, 
to have a clear, sanctioned, ultimate aim … This has been the peculiar malady of my times (901) … The Great Merchants of my parents’ youth … foresaw an orderly diffused well-being spreading out from them over all mankind (901-902) …’  

However, ‘… the tragic causes of conflict and ruin in civilisations are fundamentally internal to each society … [and realised through] internal disruptions and suicidal revolutions.  Every generation is born as ignorant and wilful as the first man; and when tradition has lost its obvious fitness or numinous authority, eager minds will revert without knowing it to every false hope and blind alley that had tempted their predecessors long since buried under layer upon layer of ruins.  And these eager minds may easily become leaders; for society is never perfect (902) …’ 

Equanimity and sentiment in a material context

The conundrum of paradox enters quite early in the context of 
The Last Puritan when the narrator relates the young Peter Alden’s dilemma.  

‘Was everything in this world like a puzzle-picture which seen right side up was the lovely Titania and turned upside down became a donkey’s head?’ (17)  

Correspondingly, Peter’s elder brother, Nathaniel Alden, 
despite his pervasive sense of staid conventionality, is imbued with a somewhat substantial appreciation of artistic endeavours.  ‘… It was a public duty to encourage art in a new country.  [A person] shouldn’t ask whether a struggling painter deserved encouragement, but whether he needed it (20) …’ 

However, it is soon revealed that Nathaniel recognises and respects the perpetuity of humanity in the material realm.  

‘Physical death is … unimportant (22).  

‘All a dead man’s unselfish interests survive in the living (22).  

‘We throw into the dust-heap only some outworn soiled copy of the classic text (22) …’  

While, ‘church’ was too much of a vast public institution.  

‘The poignancy of your feelings is dissipated in so large a place’ (22), Nathaniel declares. 

Thence a resigned spirit of equanimity soon becomes propitious amid this broad acceptance of materiality.  

‘Your feelings aren’t wasted in vapid emotion but you readjust yourself silently to this changing world.  Every death loosens a little the crust of habit, and is a step forward in life …’ (22).  

Consequently, a sober conservatism prevails in Nathaniel’s world:  
‘Of course, we all believe in democracy, and wish all classes to enjoy the greatest possible advantages:  but we shall never help the less fortunate to rise to our level if we sink away from it ourselves (29) …’ 

Yet material existence is not thereby rendered any more desirable, 
as the narrator later notes ironically, on behalf of Nathaniel:  ‘… Even if you were doing nothing morally wrong, to be unobserved was always reassuring.  It restored to you half of that negative blessedness which you would have enjoyed if you had been non-existent’ (32).  

Such parsimony is soon echoed by Peter’s life coach, Mr Lowe:  
‘… Put away human respect.  Man is only one of God’s many creatures; 
here in the wilds you see how little the pride or the welfare of man counts in the universe (41) …’ 

Meanwhile, Nathaniel seemed afflicted with the very malady of arrogance which seems so prevalent in formal social relations of any age.  

‘For a moment he almost was envious, almost ashamed:  
yet … restored [in him] was that sense of superiority which was necessary to his moral being.  Whatever he had and was must be right, whatever he hadn’t and wasn’t must be wrong:  else how should he face the universe?  This first axiom of his American ethics was at once verified by observation (45) …’ 

Alternatively, in his youth Peter was precocious from a ‘sentimental’ aspect.  

‘Peter’s impulse was to ramble, to observe, to follow up, not too hopefully, little casual adventures and acquaintances (51) …’  Yet,  ‘His liberty dragged the lengthening chain of a bad conscience’ (51).  

Through his forays into various global extremities, during his subsequent travels, Peter noted the anomalies of rational American colonial insistence.  

‘All the rest which in fact we [Americans] were teaching, 
or attempting to contaminate them with – our industry, politics, religion, 
or philosophy – besides being grotesque for them, and unnecessary, was all infected among us at its source, and thoroughly rotten before we exported it [to ‘the East’] (54) …’ 

When Harriet eventually married the eminently ‘wealthy’ Dr Peter Alden, 
as he by then eventually became, she declared to her lifelong friend, 
Letitia Lamb, that ‘wealth is such power ‘, to which Letitia replied,  
‘And such responsibility (66)’ 

Then, when their son, Oliver, was born, 
Harriet reaffirmed her perspective that ‘… A Daughter of the American Revolution could not prefer her own comfort to the claims of posterity.  Posterity was Oliver … he was her son:  that marked his true place (71) …’  According to the narrator, a ‘stray chromosome’ had ‘imposed this unstable romantic equilibrium on every atom of the man-child’s [Oliver’s] flesh, and … sinews …’ (75)  

Even as an infant, Oliver ‘… seemed ready for everything, 
anxious for nothing, willing to wait and see.  Philosophy possessed the soul of this child from his first breath; inarticulately, of course, as it was destined, at bottom, to remain always; because the words which his education supplied were not capable of uttering it truly.  But in action, in determination, and by a sort of inner blind fortitude, his faith was distinctly in him from the beginning (76).  

‘There were good things and there were bad things, and there was an equal duty to pull through and come out somehow on the further side of trouble (76) … 

‘At least so I venture to put into words for him, 
words which wouldn’t have satisfied him … His education, in spite of such excellent diligent masters, was carried on exclusively by himself (76).  

‘It consisted in learning the places of goods and evils, and the way they followed one another (76) … Every day accentuated the difference between himself and what happened to him.  Living real and self-justified was only his own will, the inner spring of his being, the centre and judge of all that unaccountably went on (77) …’ 

Oliver’s governess, the German Fraulein Irma, 
‘ … was a great admirer of Goethe, and felt how beautiful a healthy sensuality was to round out the character, and how important it is to develop harmoniously every side of our nature’(86).  

Meanwhile, Mrs Alden ‘… froze at the touch of difference (89) … 

‘Her moral ideal was democracy, but a democracy of the elect (89).  

‘There could be no oppression in imposing uniformity on people who were really alike (89) … 

Alternatively,  ‘… Irma was affectionate (92).  

‘Her personality began to percolate, as it were, into [Oliver’s] own (92).  

‘Discipline was relaxed … The routine of life might have become more plastic, making a little room for caprice.  But was caprice less tiresome than law?  Both seemed to be imposed by some mysterious fatality (92) … 

‘One day, without any reason, [Oliver] climbed up from her knee and put both arms round her neck, holding on very softly and very tight for what seemed to her a long time.  ‘But darling,’ she said, smothering her emotions, ‘why do you do that?’ (95) …’  

The narrator later offered a pervasive insight into the foibles of human nature.  ‘Self-knowledge after all is fallible, and the position of the insulted party is weak, defending himself against cool and smiling injustice (97) …’ 

Meanwhile, ‘… a parent, a leader, an irresponsible power or sovereign God … wishes to be the centre of direction, if not the source of material power … 
[His or Her] great achievement will be to harness forces that seemed intractable, and to identify the good with his own material ascendency (99) …’ 

Later, Irma disclosed in a long letter to her sister (dated 1896):  
‘… I am going to say something dreadful, dearest sister, but I feel it (111) … 

‘We must not cling to anything achieved, 
but stretch out our eager hands for ever to the Beyond (111) … 

‘The free, bold, pure German genius cannot be confined to such a single narrow path.  It will forge its way out of itself in any direction, in all directions, into the infinite, scorning all law save that which It imposes on Itself at each moment by living, molested by no facts, recognising no conditions, 
but creating always the next step by Its untrammelled sudden inspiration.  Nature is a prison.  As for me, give me Chaos !’ (111) …’ 

While, for ‘Peter Alden and his wife:  
‘… It was imperative that Oliver should learn to live and to think democratically; that he should discover what American life was (112-113) … He must feel at home in his country.  He must begin by sharing spontaneously the habits and enthusiasms of his generation; otherwise he would never be able to influence them for the better (113) …’ 

Thence, in this context, Oliver’s situation in life blossomed forth.  

‘Oliver soon found, as he afterwards used to put it, 
that there was a sunny and a shady side to the road of knowledge (113).  

‘The sunny side was the study of nature, where all exploration was joyful and free from evil passion and prejudice.  The same was true of mathematics (113-114) …’  While,  ‘… In his boyhood, though words and ideas were lacking to express it, this puritan disdain of human weakness and of human genius was at work silently within him (114) …’ 

Some of the complex anomalies of an American life of ‘privilege’ were then broached through Oliver’s distinctive experience and character as this developed.  

‘… Selfishness and self-indulgence were such a danger for young people, especially for an only child, with the example of his father too, who lived so much aloof, and wasn’t really so ill as never to be able to do anything for other people … There was a quiet melancholy in privilege.  One must accept privilege, because it brought a chance of greater achievements:  
but happiness, pure joy, would have come rather in having no privileges and being lost in the moving crowd (117) … There must be leaders, or there would be no grandeur in life; but there was something tragic, something ominous, 
in being chosen to lead (118) …’ 

Moreover, the subtle paradox of Providence remained luminous in all this.  

‘Providence did wonderful things through unworthy instruments (126).  

‘You might be fearless and shrewd and without an atom of deference for anybody on God’s earth, and yet you might be full of faith, hope and charity (126) …’ 

Fraulein Irma contributed her distinctive elemental perspective.  

‘… It mustn’t be beauty of words or of enthusiasm [which enlivens Oliver]:  
it must be pure truth, even if sometimes sad.  I was reading Schopenhauer to him yesterday … Well, when I read how everything becomes beautiful and as it were enchanted when we suspend our Will and see the whole world merely as an Idea, Oliver stopped me, made me re-read that paragraph, and wouldn’t let me go until he had repeated it himself three times in eloquent German (132-133). 

Facets of Oliver’s nature and character gradually became more redolent.  

‘Cities, for Oliver, were not a part of nature (140).  

‘He could hardly feel, he could hardly admit even when it was pointed out to him, that cities were a second body of the human mind, a second organism, more rational, permanent and decorative than the animal organism … 
a work of natural yet moral art (140) …’ 

While a splendidly candid impression of the Eastern lifestyle is attributed by Oliver to his father, Peter Alden.  

‘They do these things better in the East [sleeping] (144).  

‘They make love when they feel love, and lie down to sleep when they are sleepy, and nature irresistibly closes the eyes (144) …’ 

Through this thence renewed close kinship with his father, 
Oliver realised a new energy in his life – in this ‘… newly discovered capacity, he could cease to be silent, retiring, and perpetually ironical … he could feel and accept affection; and he could grow eloquent … for his own subtle amusement, like a sort of poet in life, to whom nothing was quite real (150) …’  

However, it was vital to remain alert to the anomalies of life.  

‘Matter is full of hidden springs and unexpressed affinities; 
some further furtive influence here, some secret impulse there, will presently set in motion an insidious drift, destined to disrupt that equilibrium.  
A curious evolution will follow, or a sudden explosion (151) …’ 

Happiness was essentially intuitive.  

For Oliver:   
‘… To be happy was to sing; not to be made to sing, or to sing by rote, 
or as an art, or for a purpose, but spontaneously … 
Things were [then] truly beautiful (159-160) …’ 

Paradox thence pervaded superficiality to enliven and fortify the veracity of reality in the context of humanity.  

‘Perhaps human affairs were just as easily about natural phenomena, and the whole trouble came from trying to regard them otherwise (160-161) …’ 

Meanwhile, ‘Lord Jim Darnley, as the captain of Peter Alden’s yacht, contributed his radically utilitarian perspective.  

‘Mind what I tell you; freedom of the press and Hyde Park oratory 
– even if it goes on in Parliament – are going to be the ruin of England … America also and France … we British are a practical people.  If we can’t legally punish a man for what he has said, we find him guilty of what he hasn’t done (163) …’ 

Oliver then pondered the legacy of Nietzsche:  
‘… What a fool, after all, that Nietzsche was.  Poetry and philosophy and sermons purposely went off at a tangent, purposely lied, in order to make an impression (165) …’  

Basically, such work and art lacked authenticity.  

‘First admit the truth, and then make the best of it.  
That’s a man’s work (165) …’ 

Pontius Pilate would no doubt have responded:  ‘But what is truth ? ‘ ! 

Soon Oliver found his father, Peter, reposed in a comatose transcendental state which seemed such a strange disposition, given Oliver’s experience of him.  

‘What was Peter but one of the hundred shrewd, rich, spare, 
defeated Americans of his generation, become a man of the world and left high and dry in it?  Neither he nor his Buddhistic sanctum … would have struck a connoisseur as more than eccentric and capricious – a faddish refuge for debility (170-171) … Yet a man whose only knowledge of admirable works of art is drawn from photographs or translations, and who has no idea of the originals in their inimitable native force, may find nevertheless in the presence of those counterfeits a fresh fountain of insight and enthusiasm welling up in himself.  So our budding transcendentalist was made inwardly aware … 
of a new possible dimension of moral life (171) …’ 

Meanwhile,  ‘… Dope was the very denial of courage … 
a betrayal of responsibility … Could it be that life as the world understands it was the veritable dope? … Was the obedience to convention and custom and public opinion perhaps only an epidemic slavery, a cruel superstition? …’ 

Then,  ‘… Peter[‘s] … thoughts drifted back to the time of his marriage, 
to the home-coming from all his defeated experiments … these last sixteen years had passed in comparative peace.  Now somehow that equilibrium seemed to be disturbed (178) … Walt Whitman is as superficial as Rousseau.  He doesn’t see that human conventions are products of nature, that morality and religion and science express or protect animal passions (181) …’ 

Eventually, the weary adventurers visited Peter’s Cousin Caleb Wetherbee, who contributed a characteristic perspective of Emerson’s influence on philosophic interpretation.  

‘Poor prodigal world, let us not insult it; let us pray for it (186).  

‘But meantime, we must remain ourselves, as Emerson remained himself, only not on those stilts of his, not with that self-worship, because the world was no more made to serve us by illustrating our philosophy than we were made to serve the world by licking its boots.  Now, in Boston and at Harvard, for an intellectual man willing to stand alone, the opportunities are unparalleled (186-187) …’  

Yet,  ‘… America is the worst of influences (187) … 

‘It imposes optimism, imposes worldliness, imposes mediocrity (187).  

‘But our mediocrity, with our resources, is a disgrace, our worldliness a sin, our optimism a lie.  That is why I have built this monastery (187) …’ 

While Caleb challenged: 
‘… what else can good men be without the Faith, and seeing only the wrong side of the tapestry …’ but to be ‘sentimentalists’ (187). 

Moreover, Peter admonished Oliver that from Cousin Caleb, 
‘… at least you will learn not to believe the Germans when they tell you that there is only one living or respectable philosophy in the world at a time (189).  

‘All philosophies are open to us always.  The next generation may very likely turn its back on progress and revert to some settled tradition (189) …’ 

Later, Oliver clarified a potential misconstrued perspective in Fraulein Irma’s interpretation of Goethe’s legacy.  

‘She says that philosophy is always outgrowing its own systems, 
and that Goethe had outgrown all the philosophies up to his day, but that we haven’t outgrown his, because it sums up all our science (191-192) …’  

Cousin Caleb was salutary in his reply:  
‘Don’t let the Germans cheat you, my boy … Their manipulations of history are always different and always scandalous.  It is all a play of wilful arbitrary perspectives, hiding what you please, and joining what you please (192) … 

‘Yet they are good teachers … because … they put you through the mill … Goethe … knew the world; he was very learned:  and he lived in a somewhat manageable society … But he was a diabolical guide for the soul ! … I said he knew the world; but he worshipped the world – worshipped nature, and life, and society, and convention or whatever else we call the world 
– which proves that, at bottom, he didn’t know the world (192) … 

‘I don’t think Goethe meant to deceive (194).  

‘He supposed that nobody would be so stupid as not to understand (194).  

‘Of course there was nothing but life in this world.  What better salvation could you hope for? (194) …’  

And, again, of Americans:  
‘… We were always a circumcised people, consecrated to great expectations.  Expectations of what?  Nobody knows:  yet I believe God has revealed to me something of the direction of his providence (195-196) …’ 

Oliver preferred ‘old books of exploration and adventure’, 
the journals of ‘Captain Cook’ among these, to the standard classics.  

‘The human element there was in close enough contact with nature not to seem silly (199) …’ 

While,  ‘… Oliver decided that it was good for you to be set up on a pedestal and [to] put on good behaviour.  You had to live up to the free sentiments assigned to you, and you ended up by acquiring them (199) … 

‘You were challenged to refine your perceptions and to purify your motives (199-200) … There was plenty of instruction in things, and real life was romantic enough.  What story could be more interesting than Oliver’s own experience (200) …’  

Oliver asked Jim about Cousin Caleb:  
‘Couldn’t he be a saint and love nature and humanity, as Emerson did, 
without being converted?’ (200)  

As a response, in part, Jim observed of Goethe:  
‘… Life as it came seemed to him divine – not happy …’  Goethe was at home in nature and at home in himself (202) …’ 

Further experiential journeying – mediating convention  

When a difference arose in Oliver’s perspective to that of his mother over a prospective further adventure on his father’s yacht, he recalled Peter’s advice to him ‘… to get a little intellectual airing and to discover that the particular philosophy [he] had been brought up in was only a convention, like all philosophies, and probably a convention that was wearing thin (214) …’ 

Irma aptly discerned the imperative consequence of Oliver’s decision in this.  

‘How well I know that feeling ! (219)  

‘The need of being alone, the need of seeing ourselves and our decisions on the background of our whole lives, past and future, and of universal, indifferent, all-healing Nature ! (219) … Yet this cruelty of ultimately [rejecting his mother’s advice] was only the other side of his integrity, of his severity with himself.  His decision must be taken alone, alone with God:  
and it wasn’t to be an easy decision (221-222) …’ 

While the narrator noted that Oliver 
‘… had passed over to the enemy taking with him his arsenal of puritan virtues – his integrity, his courage, his scorn of pleasure, his material resourcefulness, together with a secret and almost malicious sense of alliance with the unseen (225) … so very few things were really beautiful, so very few left you happier and more refreshed.  Perhaps his mother was right (226).  

‘Better not travel, if you wished to admire the world; if you wished to think highly of your fellow men, better not hug them too close.  He could feel the disappointment, the bitterness, in his father’s kindness; 
the mixture of contempt and consideration (226-227) …’ 

Soon, the utilitarian aspect of his dilemma was encapsulated for Oliver.  

‘There was a sort of stupid satisfaction in having done something, 
not matter what:  but wasn’t there anything better, that one might do keenly, clear-mindedly, with one’s whole soul? (228) …’ 

Eventually, Oliver got to embark on his adventure, 
which included taking in a performance of Hamlet with Jim Darnley.  

‘Hamlet provokes speculation, and without speculation, 
without wonder raising afresh, the most baffling ultimate questions, the fervid confabulations of youth would not be complete.  Philosophy is a romantic field into which chivalrous young souls must canter out bravely, to challenge the sinister shadows of failure and death (234) … 

‘Hamlet, Oliver explained [to Jim], was perfectly brave and firm when once sure of being right; but he had a tremendous intellect, tremendously pure and superior to all cut-and-dried opinions of ordinary people and even of science.  This was what rendered him unfit for the everyday world (234-235) …’ 

Then the actual intent of Oliver’s spirit becomes evident.  

‘Yes, Oliver meant to travel:  not as his father had travelled, 
in the spirit of a dilettante and an exile, but in order honestly to learn the state of the world, and to understand his own country better and work for it more intelligently (238) …’ 

Soon a visit to London is arranged for Oliver.  

London was, for Peter Alden, most accommodative.  

‘Here everything was arranged for his comfort and pleasure (243).  

‘Existence lost its acerbity, and all conventions seemed designed to oil and to make silent the machinery of fate.  The world, as it were, had been strained through a sieve:  only the decent, the concordant, elements had filtered through, with only the approved flavours; and the incidents of one’s normal day seemed to gain in flattering depth what they lost in variety (243).  

‘They were just the incidents which, if free, 
your inner man would have provoked (243) …’ 

Moreover,  ‘… The truly sweet fruits of existence were to be picked by the way:  they were amusement, kindness, and beauty (244) …’ 

Inspiration from the Vicar of Iffley, Jim Darnley’s father, 
brings a more openly spiritual element into consideration: ‘… what anything may be in its own nature, whether we speak of angels or men or material things, is a point known only to God.  To us an angel is essentially a messenger, as the Greek word indeed imports; and it is the angel’s message that is the veritable angel to us.  I think, my dear friends, that all things are angels (249) … the Truth of natural fact also, the Truth of science, what a stumbling block it is.  How anxiously, how insecurely, the Church strives to protect the treasure of her faith from that merciless flood (250) …’ 

Later some reflections on the soul were expressed resonantly.  

‘Life itself is a triumph of the soul (254).  

‘But there are instrumentalities requisite to bring down from heaven the particular happiness of which each soul is capable … The vocation of souls is different.  Some can be happy and beautiful in the body, others in the world, others only in the spirit.  Yet in a man the perfection of merely bodily life or of worldly arts is somehow tragic … And in singly exercising his natural gifts – and what more can we ask of a free soul justly? – he must offend the world, and he must neglect the spirit.  Nobody can unite all the virtues (254) … 

‘We must choose what we will sacrifice (254).  

‘The point is to choose with true self-knowledge (254) …’ 

Through his experience of sharing with the Vicar, 
Oliver realised a profound enabling of his spirit.  

‘How beautiful were austerity and poverty and obscurity (258).  

‘What a revelation that there might be in the world, 
places and persons untouched by the world, lives in which only nature, 
only religion, only friendship, were real (258) … 

Correspondingly, Mrs Darnley, the Vicar’s wife, 
offered a further perspective of pertinent reflection for Oliver.  

‘Ah, the little troubles, Mr Oliver, they ruin a woman’s life (276) … 

‘As for your grand sorrows, they are a parcel of our common humanity, 
like funerals; and the Lord designs them for our good, to wean our hearts from this sad world.  There’s where the Vicar can comfort me, where I don’t need comforting (276) …’ 

Through this stream of associated reflections, 
Oliver derived a resonant sense of the interaction of humanity and nature.  

‘Larks were singing in the sky, and the very thumping of the paper-mill, 
now in operation, seemed to give forth a reassuring and jovial note, as if nature looked kindly on honest human industry, and could adopt it and interfuse it with her own labours.  ‘No,’ thought Oliver, ‘there is nothing sinister here.  It is only I that take things hard.  I am shocked at human nature (278).  

‘I have been trained to disguise everything, to conceal everything, 
to find it intolerable that the truth should be what it can’t help being (278).  

‘Why is human conscience so exacting, so impertinent? (278)  

‘In nature, if things were let alone they would be perfect (278) … 

‘But how lovely each natural thing could be, if it could be true to itself ! (278) … 

Thence he proceeded to a most pertinent perspective on the place and significance of knowledge.  

‘If people could know everything, absolutely everything, about one another, would they love one another more or less?  More, Oliver thought; and that was why life was so uncomfortable and hateful in a world where everybody was hiding his conduct and his true feelings from everybody else (285) … 

‘If we knew everything about one another we should probably be very much more terrified and desolate:  we should see how little the people who loved us understood us, and how much the people we loved despised us (285).  

‘Yet we should be reconciled even to all this wasted affection and this hostility at cross-purposes.  We should love and forgive everybody as we love and forgive ourselves (285-286) …’  

Soon Oliver found himself situated to spend some time with his cousin, 
Mario Van de Weyers (Vanny).  Vanny sounded off about ‘love’, and Oliver responded such as to challenge Mario to be more definitive in his perspective.  

‘Suddenly the youngster was abashed (295).  

‘For the first time he [Mario] felt younger than his cousin.  He felt cheap (295).  

‘But the Aesculapians at least had taught him how one may always recover one’s moral balance by confession, by self-knowledge, by changing into the key of humility; and he broke out:  ‘I’m sorry.  I was talking rubbish’ (295) …’ 

Some incisive analysis was thence advanced through Oliver’s perspective of student attitudes to learning and sport.  

‘The young barbarians were at play not only in the playing fields … 
for what was all this lovely, faded religion and lovely, faded learning, but play of imagination?  To sport, to play; to trust, maintain, and refine the inspirations of the heart – what else was the principle of honour, of that aristocratic liberty, fidelity, and courage (298) …’  

There was also an emphatic statement on the moral implications of ‘money’ from Oliver.  

‘Money was a trust, a responsibility (307).  

‘You must not think that you had it just to save you trouble and fatigue (307).  

‘On the contrary, money kept you running and working and planning and struggling, until you dropped … Oliver was as quick in intuition as he was deliberate in action and speech (307) …’  

Oliver proceeded to form moral integrity and authenticity through his prospective education in the ambience of the hallowed milieu of Eton.  

‘He began to distinguish styles … but by a human instinct, 
as one distinguishes people and things of different moral quality.  He began to form his taste (311) … across the miscellany of prosaic information a certain breath of understanding began to blow.  Images fell into groups and invited the imagination to piece them out … facts had flowered into ideas, 
into harmonies.  The book of experience had become for Oliver a book of poetry; and as he read the words he heard the music to those words (312) …’ 

Soon Peter responded pensively to Oliver’s zestful spirit of enquiry.  

‘Peter murmured, not really perplexed, 
but dreading to stir up the deposit of ideas floating, half inanimate, 
like submarine animals, at the bottom of his mind … ‘England … is an easy enough country to live in, but very had to understand.  It never has understood itself:  it exists by a living compromise between incompatible tendencies.  We in America are simpler (313) …’  [Yet] … Our pride in freedom is a mere affectation; we put it on in order to stifle our deeper conscience … For if there were really only a single right path and a single right goal for all of us, if we were all innately addressed to the same virtues and the same truths, then evidently discipline would be necessary (315) …’ 

Oliver then became preoccupied with these moral reflections.  

‘The old Calvinists, Oliver felt, hadn’t been puritan enough:  
you were not pure at all, unless it was for the love of purity; but with them it had all been a mean calculation (318) … this reason of theirs was just their reason, their effort to entrench themselves in their limitations (319) … 

‘Perhaps the whole pilgrimage of spirit was the only goal of spirit, 
the only home of truth (319) … Was there anything here but chaos and a welter of impulses, a truth composed of illusions, a home all perpetual unrest? (319-320) … The whole adventure of existence became no less horrible than enticing (320) … 

‘Certainly it wasn’t flattery to be called a puritan; 
in most people’s mouths it was the opposite.  Yet puritan he was conscious of being and determined to remain, if this meant being self-directed and inflexibly himself … One might throw off a foreign incubus, or develop a latent faculty; but it was impossible to change one’s origin and the circumstances that had made one the sort of being one was (326-327) … [Yet] If Puritanism meant stupidity, ignorance or hatred of the beautiful, then it was wrong to be a puritan, and he wasn’t one, or at least didn’t wish to be (327) … 

‘Existence was a complication, a commitment, a pose (351).  

‘Of course, to play the game you must follow the rules:  
but why this game, or these rules?  And why play at all? … He was perfectly content to be this person [Oliver Alden] and play his part (351) … 
After all, one’s real self was universal spirit (351-352) … 

‘He was happy in the mere sensation of voyaging, 
bearing inexpressible possibilities locked up somewhere within him, 
together with strength and courage somehow to reduce them to acts (352).  

‘It mattered comparatively little what the particular adventures might be; 
the spirit of the action and the manner of it would transfigure anything (352).  

‘The point was to be a gentleman, to be vowed to defend and exalt the beautiful in all things, to be the champion of tenderness, of honesty, of liberty (352-353) … [Yet] the spirit was inhumanely happy in the very miseries of the world, and not puzzled or oppressed by all the world’s contradictions, 
because the very life of the spirit was the painful joy of conceiving, of solving, or of enduring them (353) … There might well be no better way to their hearts than gifts and the prospect of gifts.  Yet they had hearts (354) …’ 

Meanwhile, Oliver observed of Vanny:  
‘… He wants to see things as I see them, when I see them, from the same angle, so that there may be one object for two minds, one feeling in two persons.  Everything then becomes a new bond of union (354) …’ 

While some deep reflections about Vanny from Oliver followed.  

‘He himself is ever so much handsomer, more brilliant, accomplished, 
and fashionable than I could ever dream of being, and so are a lot of his friends; he doesn’t need me to amuse him or excite him or flatter him (356) … 

‘He feels it, and wants to comfort me; 
and he does it by trusting me, by asking for my opinion in everything and building on it as if it were gospel truth … as if he had never understood things so well or been so happy before.  He counts on me … He needs steadying (356) …’ 

The human element is most resonant in all this for Oliver: 
‘… it would be enough if one-fourth of our time and of our hearts were given to human affairs and the other three-quarters to – what ? (359) 

‘Nature, truth, God, call it what you will:  that larger inhuman something that surrounded humanity, sustained it, and made it ridiculous (359-360) … 

‘Our whole human world was horribly second-class (360) … 

‘The sad human side of things was their near side:  
we could rise to the happy impersonal spheres of nature and truth only if we had first prudently organised our bodies and our societies, so as to have eyes to see and telescopes to help them.  That was why the life of your pure adventurer, of your utterly free mind, was so tragic (360-361) … Might it not be that we were all in reality upon a pilgrimage? … Impelled by these sentiments, Oliver passed the barrier into the after deck (361) …’ of the Lusitania luxury liner, on which he was embarked, during an earlier trip to that of its tragic demise.  

‘Accordingly, the young Apostle braced himself to seek his lost sheep in the second-class smoking-room …’ – Jim Darnley (362) … ‘ ‘But it’s so beautiful on deck’ Oliver murmured, hanging back.  Yet he allowed himself to be pushed by main force through another door and down a labyrinth of narrow passages (363) … They were on deck by this time and he had recovered his equanimity (364) … 

‘Friendship is a pagan ideal, the boyish sentiment of comrades in discovery.  The tenderness of maturity and disillusion had another colour:  and it was charity (365) … ‘They say the sea is monotonous, but look at it !  It’s more shifting, more living than the land, and yet more constant (365) …’ 
Oliver declared to Jim.  Then, when Jim suggested he might retain certain items from Oliver’s now deceased father’s yacht, Oliver noted he ‘… could only smile a little sadly.  He didn’t want mementoes of anything; 
he remembered only too well (367) …’ 

Some candid perspectives on love then proceed, from Jim initially.  

‘That’s all very well; but it sounds a bit theoretical when a chap is actually in love.  Every man thinks his own case an exception:  and he’s right, because each case is really different (369) …’  And then Oliver’s perspective of ‘respectable Americans’:  ‘… One of your tied-up, muscle-bound, 
hoodwinked fools, smothering his little spark of hot life in a heap of household ashes … What is love-making but a recurring decimal, always identical in form and always diminishing in value?  True:  yet it’s a part of life, and it’s no use trying to live on principles contrary to nature.  You must go in for existence blindly, before you know what will come of it (374) … Jolly thing, tenderness.  One is never happier than when other people are good (375) …’ 

As Oliver proceeded through the years of his youth his character and nature formed out inexorably.  

‘At a certain depth he continued to live always in the light of another world, where only such things moved as had touched his heart (379) … 

‘Oliver’s nature was already so well-knit, so self-determined, that it was self-repeating, like that of an old man:  all his days, all his plans, all his friendships tended to run through the same phases (380-381) … He often found himself carried along by the ways of a world that wounded him in every fibre (381-382) …’ 

Ethics and sentiment as elements of civility

Then when Oliver met up with Vanny, when he travelled to ‘America’ from Europe, he was surprised at Vanny’s blasé attitude to the aspect of New York.  

‘Moreover, [Vanny] seemed little impressed … by the wonders of the landscape … He had laughed at the Statue of Liberty and said, 
‘How Third Republic!’ (386)  

‘Even the sky-scrapers seemed a matter of course and just like the pictures.  Evidently his interest – for he was keen enough – lay in other quarters, 
in people, in their ways, in his own vital temperature (386) …’  

Later, Vanny wrote to Oliver:  
‘… But in America everybody seems to pretend that crockery and hearts are never broken, and that there’s nothing to do but to make jokes (390) …’ 

Vanny also further wrote to Oliver of Edith, Oliver’s cousin:  
‘… But you’d like Edith.  She’s not only very beautiful but terribly intelligent and well-informed and religious and wonderfully dressed in a style that is rather her own, and yet fashionable (391) …’  

When Edith noticed the press clippings when she met Oliver after his football injury, she said:  ‘Let’s put this rubbish away.  It’s a disgrace to civilisation’ (395) …’  Then later,  ‘… The young lady noticed that he spoke in a quiet low voice with a slight smile, as if his thoughts rested on something that rendered the visible foreground incidental and a trifle absurd.  He was no ordinary person.  He had a mind (395) …’ 

Some time later Oliver was overcome with reverie: 
‘… all [his immediate circumstances] combined to throw him into a placid reverie, a dream with the eyes open, in which things past and future, 
jumbled together like figures in a faded tapestry, dim images of spirited scenes, flowed by in procession (398) … Did [Edith and Mario’s actions to comfort and cheer him in his difficulties] mean nothing, or did it mean a lot? (400)  

‘It meant a lot (400).  

‘Perhaps not to them – they are so full of flighty affections – 
but it means a lot to me [Oliver].  It means here at last are my natural friends, people of my kind … What would barriers and differences matter if only in myself.  I had a world too, and knew where I stood?  Everything would work together then, and find its place (400) … ‘  

Then Oliver questions Edith’s position.  

‘The little materialist is sure she lives on earth, and is proud of not being visionary.  But what if the earth were another cloud-castle? (400) …’ 

Meanwhile, Mario’s attitude in this was somewhat disconcerting for Oliver.  

‘Sometimes Oliver thought he laughed too much, 
or at things that were perfectly serious, as if nothing in America could be anything but a delightful farce (403) … To feed Oliver’s idealism they stopped on their way back to Concord … they looked at the dreadful little house in which Emerson lived, and at his cold little sitting-room; and then they looked at each other.  Could such great things leave such mean traces? …’ (404). Oliver ‘… liked Concord in its external humility and inward pride, so much like his own (404) …’ 

Meanwhile, the complacency of mediocrity forms the basis of another more ephemeral condition.  

‘Professor Simpkins said he had once attempted to teach history at Harvard, but had found at once that history was impossible to teach.  So was every other subject.  People must teach themselves or remain ignorant, and the latter was what the majority preferred (408) …’  

Oliver considered facetiously that:  
‘… If men had no imagination they could feel no discouragement (414).  

‘Perhaps all this religion and philosophy and poetry and art were a disease to be killed off presently by natural selection (414) …  

‘When he sang Here’s a health to King Charles – which he did gloriously – 
he felt that what the cavaliers had been in the seventeenth century it was the puritan’s turn to be in the twentieth: the martyrs of a poetic and chivalrous cause (414) … Strange, Oliver thought, that he should have chosen Emerson’s room [in his university residence, Divinity Hall] without knowing it.  Irma and his mother … would think it a special Providence (416) … 

‘ ‘What was good enough for Emerson is good enough for me’ [Oliver thought] (416) …’ 

Consistency, stability and balance were emphasised by Oliver in the context of his rowing prowess.  

‘The vital centre has got to be in one place, 
not drifting about vaguely and dropping into eight or nine separate places.   And it’s likely to do so, because each man is really complete, with a vital centre of his own, and must be kept under a tremendously powerful spell, 
else he becomes independent (421) … The movement is electric and naturally finds its balance (422) …’  And, of religion:  ‘… True religion must recognise the power actually at work in the world and study its workings honestly (427) …’ 

Oliver and Mario were soon to deliberate over their course program for the year, with Mario seeking his cousin’s advice.  

‘ ’Plato in English:  Republic, Phaedrus, and Symposium’ (431) … 

‘Who’s the professor?’ … ‘Santayana’ … (431)

‘Good Lord, I can see all I want of him outside … 
he will tell you that it doesn’t very much matter [which courses to choose], because in any system of philosophy you can find something important – 
to avoid … Besides he has expressly warned me off his own lectures; he says it would be highly dangerous for me to become more civilised than I am (431) …’  Mario reported.  

While,  ‘… Ethics [is] intensely civilising … I’m not taking it myself (431).  

‘I’ve come here to read books and to learn facts – at least historical facts – 
not to cultivate sentiment.  If the facts are before a man, he will know well enough how to feel about them (431) …’ 

Thence to Mario’s perspective of religion.  

‘One religion is as good as another when good people practise it and believe they believe it.  It’s a play they like to act; they compose a part for themselves in it much more important than the role that falls to them in real life … 
it reconciles them with existence.  As for me, I find religion enough in the love of beautiful things (434-435) … Meantime, in that room in Divinity Hall which had once cradled the sleep of Emerson, Oliver, evening after evening, 
would sit at his desk … The gyrations of that seat [at his desk] seemed a symbol for the state of his mind:  a dozen irrelevant vistas opening and fading before it, and none leading anywhere or worth exploring (437).  

‘Besides, all this philosophy belonged to the shady side of the world:  
it was all a chaos of talk, of argument, of opinion.  Babel:  everyone quite sure, and nobody really knowing what he was talking about (437) …’ 

‘Yet there were moments when the intensity of Oliver’s inner life broke through to the surface … It was not the spirit of Plato, nor of Emerson, 
his predecessor in that student’s chamber, that now [or ‘then’] descended on Oliver:  it was his own spirit that inspired him (438) …’ 

An excerpt of Oliver’s essay – the first portion – then followed, 
of which these are some sentences:  ‘Plato, he wrote, may have been a great philosopher, but he knew nothing about love.  He talks only about desire … Love is … entirely different from desire and [is] unselfish (438)… Plato tries to show how desire may be for all sorts of superior things, beginning and ending with the beautiful.  Yet these superior passions remain always desires, to be satisfied by possession, in a kind of orgasm (438-439) … 

‘A beastly consequence of Plato’s confusing love with desire is that he allows desire to pollute friendship … When it comes to the Absolute Idea of the Beautiful, if this means perfection for every creature after its own kind, I can see that a desire for this would really be identical with love.  It would not be a selfish desire ending in a swoon of pleasure (439) …’  

Moreover, Oliver soon further noted:  
‘… That the problem of the universe was never in a worse mess than in the minds of the Harvard philosophers [then], take them together or take them singly (446) …’ 

While Oliver’s Aunt Caroline later chimed in with a spin on life thoroughly conducive to the authenticity of equanimity.  

‘Nature would be kind enough to us if we quietly consented to be natural; 
she would strip us of our desires before she denied us our satisfactions (456).  

‘And there are always satisfactions left, if you choose the right ones 
[that is, ‘desires’] (456) …’ 

Edith thence became the focus of Oliver’s attention, 
after their night at the theatre with other family members.  

‘She put you at your ease (462).  

‘Her good sense, her tact, her sympathy produced a feeling of safety, 
that euphoria which to Oliver was happiness.  Yet you felt you were moving on a lighter plane than your own, more resolutely excluding everything inferior, and yet more comprehensive in outlook, surer in the knowledge of the world (462) … 

‘Her complexion, her form, her movements, 
seemed altogether transfigured into something dreamlike and higher than human … ‘I had no idea’, [Oliver] said calmly, ‘that you were so beautiful.’ (463) 

She glanced at him a moment to make sure in what spirit he spoke (463) … 

‘Oliver’s admiration might be profound, but it was philosophical (463) … 

‘She smiled affably, tossed her head slightly, 
and preceded him into the lobby … Edith in turn would soon begin to adapt herself to his mind, to his intentions, until the understanding between them was perfect [Oliver thought] (463) … 

‘ ‘It’s a mystery; but of course Edith knows that if we look deep enough everything is a mystery.  We must have faith (465) … Edith feels that being beautiful is such an added responsibility [in life] (467) … [and] that it’s necessary to be in the van, even in things that might seem of no consequence, like fashion and elegance’ (468) …’ observed Maud, 
Edith’s sister. 

Later, Oliver motored with Edith from Gramercy Park for an outing.  

‘Oliver with his hand on the wheel and his eye on the road ahead possessed a physical prepotency which he lacked altogether in his social capacity as a country cousin.  Ordinarily he might seem colourless and negative [to Edith] … His powers, is own intelligence, his own satisfaction then seemed to stretch into great distances, into the heart of nature, far beyond her social intuitions (470) …’ 

However, Edith responded clearly to her impulse to challenge Oliver when he declared his love for her.  

‘Mustn’t love, when it is real, be always different from what it ever was before? (473) …’ she asked.  ‘… Let us drop this subject for the moment:  I have so many things, such deep and tender things, to say to you about it (475) …’  Edith eventually suggested sensitively.  

Then, later:  ‘Oliver … what you were saying just now affected me very much.  I have been praying for you.  Your way of feeling about love and marriage is so much finer than that of most young men, so much holier (476) … 

‘Your feelings seem to be in one way very deep and well-reasoned:  
but have you ever been in love?  We don’t, we can’t as yet care enough for each other (476) …’  

When Oliver soon drew Edith to him and kissed her:  
‘… A sort of dream-impulse ran through [Edith’s] mind to play Venus to his puritan Adonis.  But the temptation was momentary.  Her critical faculty, 
her social standards, at once reasserted themselves (477) …’  

However:  
‘… She was afraid of him; and his severity and bitterness inspired respect.  Respect and fear might turn to love (478) … 

‘ ‘My dear Oliver,’ she said in a tone of perfect serenity and impartial perception of the truth, ‘you are a rare being.  You see into one’s heart, 
and you have a spiritual discernment (478) … For a moment she wondered if it was possible that she should be snared, drawn by some uncanny power into quicksands from which she couldn’t escape [ - but only for a moment] … ‘Remember that I have had a premonition, a sort of vision of what has to happen.  I shan’t change …’  Oliver reminded her (479) … 

‘Wasn’t Edith as approachable as ever? (480) … 

‘Didn’t he on several occasions snatch a kiss; and though she said ‘Don’t’, and went on talking about other things, wasn’t it certain that she was not displeased? … wasn’t it to him she looked for understanding? (480) … 

‘His own mood was perfectly simple and free, 
innocent of all worldly or religious entanglements; and self-consciousness in him, as in so many philosophers, intercepted intuition (480) … 

‘Edith’s friendliness … was half fleshly weakness, half social affectation … 
her whole deliberate ambition wedded her to something else, remote from him altogether.  If he detected in her some artificial poses, he thought them harmless and rather becoming … Her religion was simply her overloaded way of feeling and talking … Something precious seemed essential to a beautiful woman, something slightly mysterious and slightly absurd (480) …’ 

Much later, Maud’s beau, the Montana Senator Roscoe Lunt, 
offered a definitive perspective for Oliver.  

‘I think … we can afford to skip everything since Homer:  
the interlude was all very well but means nothing to us now.  But Homer is the foundation, just as real for us today as it ever was:  genuine men in the genuine world (485) …’ [He] adds nothing, simply tells you the awful truth (486).   

‘Yet he walks on the sunny side of the world:  it’s tragedy in the sunlight, despair at high noon, death in the bloom of youth … Homer accepted things as they have to be, felt the beauty of them … You may say the point of view of the soul is the ultimate one, and the one that matters … all the other religions:  they are true to the soul … But they don’t show us this moral nature in its true setting as Homer does (486) …’ 

Then, when Oliver hears of Edith’s plans for him to work in a ‘banking house’:  ‘… He felt a great wave of desolation passing over him, an abyss separating him not only from Edith but from everybody and everything (487) …  

‘I wanted you to share my life:  I didn’t propose to adopt your way of living  (488) … 

‘I see now that you don’t believe in me (488) …’  

Oliver couldn’t seem to prove himself and his love for Edith.  

‘… He was too deep for her; he was strange, heathen, 
obscure and disturbing (488) …’  While Edith responded:  ‘… I care for you very much, and more the more I see of you … The right path for you now may be a rugged and lonely one; yet we may find in the end, perhaps in another life, that our different ways have brought us together (489) …’  

Consequently, ‘… the Edith that so many times since had seemed a goddess bending down to him so very, very near, the beautiful divine Edith had strangely evaporated.  He had never asked her for ideas, for intellectual guidance.  He had asked her for herself … But he needed love (490) …’ 

Eventually, Oliver returned from a journey around the world with Mario.  

‘The journey … taught Oliver little except how inevitably centred and miserably caged he was in himself:  not merely psychologically, in his mind and person, but socially and morally in his home world … There was no private space any longer in the world, and no freedom:  every chink and cranny was choked with the same vulgarity (507) …’ 

Whereas, for Mario:  
‘… To him the little episodes painted in the corners were often the best of the picture:  they revealed the true tastes of the artist and the unspoken parts of life.  What mastery, what lordliness there was in this independent way of observing unintended things and liking imperfect people … [yet] never lured beyond his intention, or shaken in his own tastes and judgments (507) …’ 

However, for Oliver such an approach was 
‘… impossible if you wish to do right, to make yourself and the world better (508) … You might fall in love with paganism, as Goethe did; but you mustn’t condone nature’s crimes, you mustn’t become a pagan in your heart (509).  

‘That had been Goethe’s mistake (509).  

‘In your heart you must remain a Platonist or a Christian (509) … 

‘There was, there couldn’t help being, a single supreme allegiance, 
a dedication to truth, to mercy, to beauty, infinitely to be preferred to this motley experience and this treadmill of bitter amusements.  People like Mario weren’t looking for the truth or for the best in life:  they were merely playing the game … What the Germans called Wissenschaft wasn’t knowledge but theory; and this flow of theory, while it carried any amount of learning in its controversial currents, was absolutely arbitrary in its direction.  It moved with the Zeitgeist in the direction of a trade wind.  Yet this professional science, or fashionable theory, was proclaimed in a surprising tone of authority (509) … 

‘Couldn’t the grammar of thought be studied without confusing it with cosmology? … a certain sanity of heart that should modulate desire to the key of possible achievement … To enlighten desire; to pick up the thread of salvation in this labyrinth of folly; to discern the causes of heathen bewilderment and the contrary principles of a pure life, wasn’t that what Buddha and Lao Tse had done, but too soberly for the rabble?  Wasn’t it what Socrates too had done, only too late for the Greeks? (510) …’  

Whereas, with Oxford:  
‘… The most antiquated things in it were revivals.  If the place seemed dedicated to recollection and fidelity, that was because here the seminal principles were still living which could give form to a wise mind (512-513) … 

‘Unless you are something definite to begin with, 
unless you invincibly love something in particular, how are you to distinguish a direction of progress? … In this air there was a placid tension, like the tension of truth; and this repose was only the equilibrium, at their centre, of all disputes and of all troubles … If intellectual fops liked to play with surfaces, 
it was perhaps because they were aware how inevitably the lights of things are refracted and how in any case the reality mocks us from beneath.  Curious old customs were pleasant if they were honoured with superstition; and so was fearless reason, if you were loyal at heart to your traditions (513) … 

‘Oxford philosophy seemed a compromise, a sort of lingering sunset (513) … 

‘But it was the dawn that concerned Oliver or any American, 
if dawn there was to be.  He had no use for sunsets or for compromises (513) … This would not be a sentimental compromise between the world and the spirit or between tradition and truth:  it would be an acceptance of both, 
each in its unvarnished reality … The right direction for a moral man would always lead to ultimate order and kindness:  an order itself kind; and order harmonising all sympathies, as far as such a harmony was possible (514) … Art must canalise nature, prevent disastrous inundations, and render those abundant waters navigable and sweet (515) …’ 

‘Institutions and ideas’ … and chronic ‘mediocrity’

When World War I intervened in all this Oliver was somewhat bewildered by the developments which ensued: ‘… the murders of Sarajevo, the German rearmaments, and the ultimatum to Serbia had crossed his mind like so many faits divers (522) … 

‘How sane, how proper, how splendidly steady everything was in the material world:  why should these currents of groundless passion, of perversity, of rhetorical nonsense, sweep so devastatingly through the minds of men? (522) …’ 

Mario became a recruit and remonstrated with Oliver with fatalistic energy.  

‘You think it stupid, do you? (524) 

‘Your philosophy requires you to find a reason for everything (524).  

‘But do you know why you were born?  Do you know what you are living for?  Are you sure it’s worthwhile?  It just happens’ (524) … ‘This war will be a war between Governments’ Oliver predicted in response – to which Mario replied ‘… who cares a fig about them?’ (525) … 

‘And what will you have instead?’ Oliver asked (525). 

‘Soldiers, Cardinals, and engineers, people who know something in their own line, experts, administrators, and poets … Perhaps this war will bring us our natural leaders again (525) … What does it matter who’s there at the finish, 
if only it is a finish and we kick all this modern civilisation downstairs, where it belongs?  And perhaps it’s better that we ornamental johnnies, who hang on to the old order, without any right to exist, should be first swept out of the way.  Nothing that we are good for will count any longer.  It will be a different world … My dear Oliver, you don’t perceive anything.  I’m no conservative (526) … 

‘But, why are things, how can things be, imperfect and mixed and nasty? (526) …’ was Mario’s despondent response.  

Thence, in response, Oliver ‘… began to read [the newspapers] 
with European eyes.  They began to make his moral philosophy seem rather distant, rather empty … Germany was sweeping all before it (527).  

‘Germany was prepared, organised, scientific, determined (527) … 

‘Oliver began to think it all, all this worldliness and optimism, 
flaunted by a profound, an incurable mediocrity (527) … In America these vices were childlike, unconscious, easily yielding to kindness and goodwill; 
but in Germany they rankled, nursed by centuries of envy hatred, 
and deliberate self-praise (528) …’ 

Jim Darnley was soon lost at sea when the battleship on which he was serving was sunk, and so Oliver asked of Mr Darnley, the vicar:  ‘… Is it possible for us to perceive the future, to be affected long beforehand by something that’s going to happen?’ (529) … 

‘It’s an old belief; there are scattered evidences’ … (529) the vicar responded, to which Oliver replied:  ‘… It almost looks as if what has happened now, 
and what I ought to be feeling now, had been conveyed to me then [when he was on the earlier yachting adventure with Jim] by a vivid premonition (529) … Now that sense of physical anguish is very faint; it comes to me as knowledge, not as experience; and this is a larger sorrow’ (530) … 

‘Your’s is a large soul, Oliver, and a delicate soul:  
you may be sensitive to influences that escape gross observation (530) …’ was the vicar’s astute interpretation of this deep facet of Oliver’s profound experience. 

Then Oliver sought to comfort Mrs Darnley.  

‘She felt a warmth, a strength in Oliver’s nearness which he himself was far from feeling; to his own sense he was merely groping, and trying to be as helpful as possible in a desperate case (533) … Nobody knows whether he’s doing his country any good by dying for it … And what is one’s country, anyhow?  A piece of land?  How is a piece of land in danger? (534)   

‘Institutions and ideas? (534)   

‘But institutions and ideas are always changing; 
by dying to preserve one set you will be creating another:  and there will be less that you could care for in the world after you than there was before (534).  

‘It’s a blind current that sweeps us on (534) …’  

While a candid disclosure from young Rose Darnley soon enabled Oliver to focus his awareness even more keenly.  

‘I have seen a good deal, I have heard a good deal, 
that most nice girls don’t see or hear.  It doesn’t seem strange to me that things should be as they are.  It seems sad, but natural’ (536) …’ 

Oliver experienced difficulty in relating to the War in any cogent sense.  

‘Why this strange impotence? (540)  

‘Ah, how should it be possible to do good when you haven’t discerned the good, or to abolish injustice when you’re not sure what would be just, or to diffuse happiness when you haven’t tasted it? (540) … While a private at first in the ranks, when he eventually enlisted, and soon in various more responsible posts, Oliver realised how exactly war was like football … 
the same outsiders apologised for this war, saying that poor Serbia had been outraged, or poor Belgium invaded, or the Lusitania sunk; all of which might be grounds for resentment … Just so, in little, football had been an outlet for instinct, and a mock war (541) …’ 

As for Irma:  
‘… The war, so long as America was out of it, had filled her with romantic pride:  how magnificently Germany had swept every frontier, even the sea, and what a glorious, pure, idealistic future awaited the world under German guidance … But now, with the United States at war [against Germany] … Oliver himself tried to comfort her, to reassure her.  He praised the Germans, acknowledged how faithfully they had carried out the maxims of their philosophy:  the categorical imperative, and the will to dominate; how manfully they had risen to what they believed was the call of Providence.  But all this glory was impossible without enemies … It was a terrible tragedy, Irma reflected:  but in the very horror of it there was something sublime (542) …’ 

Oliver eventually became enmeshed in activities at the War front.  

‘There was as yet no great hardship or danger [for him, as an officer], 
yet the constant worry, the constant friction, the constant discomfort had a cumulative effect on his nerves (551) …’  Even convalescence in Paris didn’t console him.  As ‘Vanny’ (Mario) said of it:  ‘… that nowhere else were things agreeable to human nature set before you with so much art and discretion (552) …’  Rather, Oliver ‘… demanded something to build upon, 
sound principles and sure possessions … Nothing existed for him save that which his moral tentacles were ready to seize (552) …’  

Then Mario’s friend, the Baronne du Bullier, 
visited Oliver to appeal for a financial concession.  

Oliver ‘… was not used to feminine softness (555).  

‘Neither his mother nor Irma, neither Edith nor Rose, 
had ever appealed to his compassion … She had smiled through her tears; she had made a little gesture of gratitude, of relief, of affection (555) …’  When Oliver was ultimately moved by all this,  ‘… She looked at him again, insistently, questioningly, knowingly.  ‘But you are moved … You love me.  You desire me … I should be so happy’ (556) …’ 

Then:  
‘A bottomless sadness, a bottomless peace, seemed to possess him (557) … As to love, the troubles of the times drove all thought of it from his mind, 
and in any case he was not free (557) …’ was the substance of Oliver’s response.  ‘… Your fiancé no doubt is in America, a thousand leagues from here.  She would be brutally exacting if she expected you to be faithful in anticipation; and if you think women really like that sort of lover, permit me to tell you that you are mistaken.  But let it be as you please … You are too serious for me (557) …’ was the Baroness’ reply. 

During a further recuperation stint, Oliver derived ample time for reflection: 
‘… even without any exceptional flashes of intuition, by threading and rethreading the labyrinth of his thoughts, he had managed to come to clearness about himself and his duty …  ‘I was expressing a radical fact (560).  

‘I wasn’t free; because the sort of love she expected from me is something 
I am held back from by my deepest nature … Because it is not any prejudice, or maxim or external prohibition that holds me back:  it’s my own will (560) … 

‘I said I was not free:  but if something held me back, 
there must have been something else in me that impelled me forward, something that, if I had been free, would have had full course (561) … 

‘Isn’t freedom happiness? … Why then not be free? (561) …’  

Thence Oliver appealed to Rose Darnley in writing; 
Rose now being the focus of his love.  ‘… The real marriage, the wedding bells, the miracle, the joy of union, the solution of everything, the sense of having touched the zenith of life, will all be in our hearts (563) …’  

When he then soon visited Rose at Iffley, Oliver was hailed by her as 
‘… the almsgiver, coming providentially, without knowing why you have come (567) …’  Oliver was more cognisant of his purpose, but Rose ‘made a little gesture of deprecation’ (568) in response to his amorous advances.  

‘My dear Oliver … you are dreaming (568).  

‘You can never come back here, to the Iffley you have known (568) … 

‘The influences that led you to think of me and seemed to lend me a certain place in your life, to make me as it were inevitable, have all ceased for ever.  What am I, what can I ever be to you, in myself, apart from that setting?  Nothing (569) …’  Rose speculated.  However, Oliver was adamant in his assurance.  ‘… Whatever element of bitterness might remain in my life, 
surely you would sweeten it as no one else could (569) …’ 

Meanwhile, Rose framed a response to Oliver’s intransigence.  

‘[Alone, and without a wife]  You wouldn’t be without a function in the world … if you could understand the world or even yourself.  Can anyone do anything better in this world than to understand the world and perhaps to reject it? (571) … 

‘I don’t believe in miracles (571) …’ she added later.  

‘She was sure his embrace was deliberate like his plan to carry her off and marry her that very day without her leave … As a young lover he was too ridiculous … In her desolation she felt a certain cruel superiority; she was compensated for all untoward accidents by her inward clearness (572) …’  

When Rose exhorted Oliver to pursue his vocation, he responded:  
‘… A philosophy that is not a religion is only a vague science or a loose eloquence; and religion we have excluded.  Science then, or art? … at what might be ideal, you find the meanest, smallest, most accidental, most absurd motives … I am not strong enough alone (573) … It is you that must be my last friend, and the dearest (574) … You are a marvellous creature, 
so perfect, so serene, so intelligent, such absolute adamant (575) …’  

Then Rose’s response followed:  
‘Oliver, what you say is poetical, kind, chivalrous.  But let me repeat, you are dreaming.  I can’t warm you because I am cold … I am content to live in suspense, in disbelief, in solitude … ‘You don’t love somebody else?’ … ‘ (576)  

‘No:  I have no other lover (576).  

‘But there are others with whom I might imagine myself in love (576).  

‘For instance, your cousin [Mario] (576) … 

‘Even if he didn’t love me more than he might any other woman; 
even … even if we were to be divorced the next day … It is nothing to be chosen, or put on a pedestal, or introduced into a program of life (576).  

‘That is sentimentality or at best partnership (576). 

‘Love is something else; and to be worthwhile it must be happy love, natural, irresistible, unnecessary love’ … Oliver perceived the irony of this, 
but somehow he felt no sting (576) … But she was obdurate, hardened still more by a persistence on his part which she thought stupid and a bit tyrannical … ‘Can’t you see that I would rather die than marry you?’ 
she said (577) …’ 

Obliged to relent from his passion, Oliver eventually declared:  
‘… The strain is relaxed … the doors open, and after all those unnecessary thrills and anxieties, I am walking out into the night, into my true life, into the inexorable humdrum punctual company of real things.  I am falling back upon my deeper self (579) … 

‘It is this self-recovery, this self-knowledge, that exalts me … 
[Rose and Edith] may not have been the right women, but they were the right symbols for me then for the thing I needed, for the thing I must find (580) … 

‘At bottom it can’t be any one woman or any one thing (580).  

‘It must be all perfections and all beauties and all happiness (580) … 

‘Now affection and kindness are all that I have felt or ever ought to feel about the real Rose, or about the real Edith … but where I have added a touch of love … then I was not seeing the reality in them at all, but only an image, 
only a mirage, of my own aspiration … my image of them in being detached from their accidental persons, will be clarified in itself, will become truer to my profound desire; and the inspiration of a profound desire, fixed upon some lovely image, is what is called love.  And the true lover’s tragedy is not being jilted, it is being accepted … And not in respect to women only or to friends or to dreams of personal happiness … Towards them, towards my wife and children, if I ever have them, natural affection, tenderness, sympathy; but no expectation that they can ever fill my whole being, or make my true happiness, or entrance my soul as only divine love could entrance it (580) … 

‘The Idea of a divine being … is like my false Edith or my false Lord Jim, 
a mirage … an impossible object.  Granted:  yet the falser that object is, 
the stronger and clearer must have been the force in me that called it forth and compelled me to worship it.  It is this force in myself that matters:  to this I must be true … I was born a moral aristocrat, able to obey only the voice of God, which means that of my own heart (581) … 

‘We will not accept anything cheaper or cruder than our own conscience (582).  

‘We have dedicated ourselves to the truth, 
to living in the presence of the noblest things we can conceive (582) … 

‘The mind of the world is content to potter about with surfaces and numbers and machinery:  it has been caught in the wheels of its own inventions, and its lovely motor has run away with it.  The optimists call it progress.  But I won’t keep repeating things that are false, and producing things that are useless and promising myself things that are impossible.  Either the truth or nothing (582) …’ 

Oliver ultimately passes away in a motor accident at the front line, immediately after the War.  ‘… Short and commonplace as was the soldier’s career [then], it had a beginning and an end, and a brave jollity; and if the only triumph in it was in death, such is after all the fate of all action, 
which necessarily perishes in being done … Every human achievement is submerged in the general flood of things, and its issue soon grows ambiguous and untraceable (584) …’ the story narrator proposes. 

‘… Ah, to think we have lost him, that good young man, 
that true friend of everybody, that sweet, kind, spotless creature, that needed to go to heaven to find the likes of himself … It shakes one’s faith in Providence’ (585) …’ Mrs Darnley observes in her distress when Mario later visits them to deliver the terms of Oliver’s will and testament.  

Then after Mario reads Oliver’s will Rose accepts his testament with evident appreciation: ‘… that last, about my imaginary children, is very characteristic of Oliver.  He shows himself absolutely unselfish and magnanimous; doesn’t grudge me a husband and children (587) …’  While Mrs Darnley concurs,  ‘… The goodness of this young man was only fit for a better world, where there are saints … there was nothing ever between them [Rose and Oliver] except that jest, when she was a little girl, and didn’t know what marriage meant; for later, she couldn’t expect him to look at a poor clergyman’s child, when he might have married a duke’s daughter, or some heiress in his own country (588) …’ 

Rose then sought to explain her situation with Oliver.  

‘He liked to deceive himself into thinking he was in love with me (589) … 

‘I should have failed sadly in my function if I hadn’t also protected him against myself (589) …’  Then,  ‘… Nobody ever will [love you].  You are too cold and haughty (589) …’ responds Mrs Darnley.  ‘While her mother was still speaking Rose had left the room, not to be seen in tears (589) …’   

Thence Mario explained from his perspective:  
‘… ‘I am afraid your daughter had a deeper attachment to our friend than she likes to confess.  Her sarcasms are only a feint to conceal her feelings (589).  

‘I am truly sorry (589).  

‘There must have been some misunderstanding between them (589).  

‘When people are reserved by nature their words often do their hearts an injustice (589) … 

‘The fancy I knew Oliver had for your daughter, as for a wonderful rare child, made me particularly notice her when I was at Iffley Court; and I thought she showed signs beneath her calm caustic exterior, and in spite of her youth, 
of having a deeply womanly nature (590)’ … [Mario] was amazed at the indifference, at the ingratitude of these women (591) … 

‘Charming world … The manners of the future (591).  

‘You may … make no pretence of feeling what you don’t feel’ (591) … 

‘I am [Oliver’s] representative.  I wish to honour his feelings (591).  

‘Who could do less, when those feelings were so noble, so delicate, 
and so unrewarded?’ (591) … 

‘He was on the point of saying that there is love that passeth the love of women; but he restrained himself.  Why punish a poor girl [Rose] who by her bitter words is trying to defend herself against her sufferings?  The gallantry in him came to the fore … ‘How unfair you women are !  We all adore you, 
we hang on your least wishes, we are your slaves for life.  We can’t help it … And then … you grudge us … our poor melancholy old friendships !  (592) … 

‘Poor Oliver … kept revising himself and never considered that if he had allowed himself to be as he naturally was, he would have been perfect … You dislike virtue? [in response to a comment from Rose] … You are fed up with virtue … But wild-flower virtue is the most charming thing in the world.  Who could help loving it in Oliver? (592) …   

‘Vanny [Mario] had a great tolerance for human frailty, 
and a positive love for variety of temperaments, especially in women (592) … Even to vice or to deception practised upon himself, he was full of 
good-natured indifference (592-593).  Yet that evening … He was profoundly surprised and aggrieved at the reception he had met with.  What could have attached Oliver to this family, that proved so unworthy of his affection? … Strange proud girl [Rose]; no heart; couldn’t possibly bring herself to love anybody, and was desperate in consequence … She is good-looking, she is intelligent – too intelligent.  For a country girl, she is strangely distinguished (593) … Her lover ought to adore her, or at least admire and venerate her, 
as poor Oliver did.  But I know she’s just like other women at bottom, 
only she walks on stilts (594) … 

‘Meantime, at Hawthorne Lodge [after Mario left], 
Rose had shut herself up again in her own small chamber; but this time, 
with no indiscreet visitor to overhear her, she didn’t restrain her emotions.  ‘Rose, dear, don’t cry,’ said her mother softly, stopping at the door (594) …’ 

Authenticity, continuity, consistency – optimal touchstones

Inferentially, the anomalies evident in the characters of Edith and Rose, relative to Oliver’s life journey, related through The Last Puritan, obviate many of the challenges and dilemmas Anthea Paul faces through her enunciation of what she calls ‘girlosophy’, as developed through her work 
Girlosophy – A Soul Survival Kit (2000).  This work was analysed in my October 2004 Academy of the Word ‘State of the World’ Forum Occasional Paper, entitled Discernment and Qualities.

Here I have interspersed some of the references from my 
Discernment and Qualities seminar paper with some inclusions from Paul’s work which appear in my October 2004 seminar paper, as these seem relevant to the study presented in this Friendship and Sentiment seminar paper.   

As with the contemporary girls Paul seeks to advise and encourage, 
Edith and Rose faced an ‘increasingly pressured and competitive world’ (2000: xii).  Yet, as with those admonished by Paul, they both relied on 
self-sufficiency and ‘behavioural rules’ (2000: xii) to establish their 
self-esteem and their lives in this context, thereby applying an ideology of ‘bounded contra-distinction’ (October 2004: 4) to their lives and experience.  Their propensity to nurture their faith to cultivate destiny in their lives (2004: 5) was therefore diminished.  They seemed to have forsaken the pervasive truth in life that ‘to ground ‘commitment’ requires spiritual resilience and fortitude’ (2004: 6), as I have revealed. 

Accordingly, this requires ‘a broader experience and realisation of perception, experience and spirituality’ (2004: 7) as linked with Providence and (inter)personal destiny than either Edith or Rose were able to broach, from my perspective. 

Therefore, although Edith and Rose avoided becoming ‘lost’, 
and stayed ‘on a straight road’ (2000: 44-45), they were clearly stifled by the ‘myopia’ (2004: 8) of remaining so rigidly oriented. 

Rather, ‘… authenticity, continuity and consistency in significance, meaning, relevance and resonance of [their] belief’ (2004: 8) would have been the preferential optimal touchstones for their life journey experience.  Moreover, ‘… consistency is not just about repetition, as Paul infers … 
It is also about relentlessly endeavouring to discern and contribute distinctively to the inexorable kaleidoscopic pattern of life’ (2004: 9).  
Edith and Rose could have derived much sustenance from this perspective, 
in my view.  Because ‘the whole pattern and fabric of our lives’ and of ‘humanity’ is the relevant ground for consideration in this context (2004: 9).  While ‘fulfilment’ is a greater optimal aspiration than ‘success’ in this 
(2004: 10).  

Moreover, ‘The ideal and consistency of deep ‘flowing love’ ‘ (2004: 11 [2000: 71]) is vital in this, and in which Edith and Rose seemed to be deplete.  ‘How Deep Is Your Love?’ the Bee Gees pertinently asked in this respect ! (2004: 12) 

Consequently, ‘if … ‘beauty’ means that ‘aesthetic qualities are filtered into emotions, creating recognition of the eternal in all that is physical (2000: 101)’ … then, the essence of beauty, as with all other qualities, along with our perception of it, must reside in ‘the eternal’ (2004: 15) …’ as I have interposed in the context of Paul’s analysis.  Moreover, the ‘perception of beauty incorporates what is ‘natural’ (2004: 15 [2000: 109]) … and even what may be in ‘fashion’ (2004: 15 [2000: 109]) … [in the sense of] beauty discerned in common among people (2004: 15 [2000: 109]) …’ 

This sense of universal beauty presupposes a ‘serendipitously generative element’ for ‘the revelation of beauty’ as a perceptual experience which for me constitutes ‘good fortune’ or whatever may be considered ‘fortunate’, epitomised through the experience of ‘joy’ or elation, for instance (2004: 16). 

Such a ‘serendipitously generative element’ of experience seems to have eluded the broad awareness of Edith and Rose, yet is patently evident to Oliver, for instance.  Such a realisation of experience is vital for us as, 
each and all, we seek to move ‘through the fullness of our experiential journey’ through ‘Providence’ (2004: 18).  Accordingly, ‘… there will always be a place for genuine authentic sentiment and reflection’ (2004: 18) in this endeavour. 

Paul invokes ‘equilibrium’ (2000: 175) as her preferential touchstone in life.  However, it is vital for such equilibrium to gravitate around ‘the providential source and/or essence of existence and reality’ (2004: 21) to remain feasibly authoritative and relevant ‘in dealing with contingencies and sensitivities’ in life (2004: 21), thereby to also remain pertinent in ‘dealing with ‘conflict’ ‘ (2000: 176) and/or competition.  

Blending or melding options to address these elements requires attributes and/or qualities of ‘authentic equanimity’ and ‘intuition’, reconciled through the ‘principle of paradox’ (2004: 22), from my perspective.  

Such qualities seem to have eluded Edith and Rose comprehensively, 
and are even only evident in Oliver to the broad extent Santayana allows these to be expressed and epitomised.  For me, the relevant maxim in life is ‘Savoir etre – to know, to be’ (2004: 23), rather than Paul’s more modest and utilitarian expression ‘Savoir faire – to know, to do’ (2000: 193).  

Moreover,  ‘… Intuition is the spontaneous expression of perception’ (2004: 24) for me; not to be confused with ‘instincts’ (2000: 204), which are not able to broach the broad scope of perception in their interpretive efficacy.  Meanwhile, ‘image’ (2000: 209), however configured, is crucial to ‘distinctive perspective’ and ‘perception’ (2004: 25).  Edith and Rose, from their respective constricted perspectives, seem hopelessly deplete in appreciating these vital elements as their experiential point of reference.  

Because the ‘total self-reliance’ (2000: 224) their lives epitomise is 
‘the antithesis of community’ (2004: 26), while ‘Providence and destiny are the prime agents through which values are expressed, rather than will power’ (2004: 26).  

‘Life is not always about choosing who we will be with’ (2004: 27), as I have ultimately observed – there is a ‘deeper purpose’ (2004: 27) in this quest.  However, we may feasibly construe with Paul that ‘being in flow’ (2000: 242) is good – ‘the optimal condition’ (2004: 29).  While ‘discernment’ 
(2000: 245) and ‘passion’ (2000: 252) are vital in this endeavour. 

Conclusion – the source of perception 

‘No construction, however broadly based, will have an absolute authority; the indomitable freedom of life to be more, to be new, to be what it has not entered into the heart of man as yet to conceive, must always remain standing.  With that freedom goes the modesty of reason that can lay claim only to partial knowledge, and to the ordering of a particular soul, or city, or civilisation.’ 

–	George Santayana:  quoted in Humanism by H J Blackham, 

Harvester Press, Sussex, UK, 1976 (Penguin edition 1968)

This statement from Santayana reveals the cryptic essential element of paradox through which he appreciated humanity and universality.  
There is almost ambivalence and ambiguity here – but not quite. 

There is a fundamental clarity in Santayana’s perspective.  
He realises so perceptively that there has to be something – some attribute or quality – which enters ‘into the heart of man’, or any person, before this person can actually ‘conceive’ at all, or know in any sense what is there 
… or what exists, and therefore what is reality. 

Yet if there is to be any form of ‘freedom’ – or, for me, ‘autonomy’ – 
to so perceive, then responsibility attends such a situation from the human aspect. 

Therefore, ‘modesty of reason’ prevails (my emphasis), and we can only derive ‘partial knowledge’ in this endeavour.  Consequently, Oliver, Edith, Rose, and all the characters in Santayana’s novel The Last Puritan couldn’t adequately fathom the intricate complexity of their situations. 

Inferentially, it follows in these circumstances those concerned might be inclined to be magnanimous in their respect and appreciation of each other’s perspectives, realising these derived from a common essence and/or source of perception – implying a quest for a greater broader sense of 
mutual maturity in discerning whatever mutual knowledge and/or understanding they might derive in this context.  

For any form of ‘order’ they – and by implication, ‘we’ – may establish will be necessarily deplete.  Whatever perspectival awareness we derive of reality and/or experience will always remain so deplete … No such human ‘construction’ can morally ‘have an absolute authority’.  However, this does not mean there is no ‘absolute authority’ implied and situated somewhere in the essential source of all perception.  Given such a source of perception, then it remains feasible for people to derive some authentic semblance of what is that authority through a form of authentic truth.  Our demeanour and/or disposition in the context of such a realm of endeavour would then prospectively epitomise the quality of authentic equanimity.  

REFERENCES

Mell, Lindsay  2004:		Discernment and Qualities,
				Academy of the Word
				‘State of the World’ Forum
				Occasional Paper 2004/2,
				Presented on 26 October 2004,
				Surry Hills, Sydney, Australia. 

Paul, Anthea  2000:		Girlosophy – A Soul Survival Kit, 
				Allen & Unwin,  
				Crows Nest, Sydney, Australia.

Santayana, George  1937:		

				The Last Puritan,
				Charles Scribner’s Sons,
				New York, USA.

Santayana, George  1953:

				Persons and Places,
				Published posthumously.

				Excerpts of Persons and Places from
				The Philosophy of Santayana – Selections, 
				Irwin Edman (ed.) 
				Constable and Company 
				New York, USA.
				1953 Edition.