Today’s Poem: I would I might forget that I am I

George Santayana’s self-consciousness

Antonie van Steenwinckel, Vanitas Portrait of the Painter, c. 1681 (Wikimedia Commons)

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I would I might forget that I am I

by George Santayana

I would I might forget that I am I,
And break the heavy chain that binds me fast,
Whose links about myself my deeds have cast.
What in the body’s tomb doth buried lie
Is boundless; ’tis the spirit of the sky,
Lord of the future, guardian of the past,
And soon must forth, to know his own at last.
In his large life to live, I fain would die.
Happy the dumb beast, hungering for food,
But calling not his suffering his own;
Blessèd the angel, gazing on all good,
But knowing not he sits upon a throne;
Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood,
And doomed to know his aching heart alone.
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Awareness of the curse of self-consciousness reaches something like a pinnacle in Today’s Poem, Sonnet VII in the 1894 Sonnets and Other Verses, the first book published by George Santayana (1863–1952).

And perhaps that is as should be, since Santayana is probably best remembered as a philosopher, author of such works as the 1896 Sense of Beauty, the 1905 Life of Reason, the influential 1911 essay “The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy,” and the 1923 Scepticism and Animal Faith — a contemporary and uneasy fellow of what was something like a golden age of American philosophy, with Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914), William James (1842–1910), Josiah Royce (1855–1916), and John Dewey (1859–1952).

But what then is one to make of Santayana’s bestselling 1935 novel, The Last Puritan? He taught philosophy at Harvard for 23 years, and the students who later would testify to his influence include T.S. Eliot, Conrad Aiken, and Robert Frost, alongside such mixed figures as Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippman, and W.E.B. Du Bois. In the end it may be Santayana’s multifacetedness that seems his most characteristic feature.

George Santayana (Wikimedia Commons)

One could argue that what formed his thought was his upperclass Spanish heritage, or his non-believer’s cultural agreement with Catholicism, or his education, from Boston Latin and Harvard in America to Cambridge and Berlin in Europe. He seemed always to have a benign fondness for, and detached satirical sense of, the Bostonian landscape.

But maybe we should also take seriously that the philosopher’s first book was poetry, and in that book he feels the burden of the uniqueness of the human — the self-consciousness that differentiates us from everything higher and lower on the great chain of being. If the poetry of a similar idea is superior in Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), whose Duino Elegies appeared in 1923, Santayana may still have put the clearest expression of the thought that self-consciousness is the reason that humans suffer from their intermediate position. Better to be a dumb beast or a blessèd angel, both unknowing that they know.

A sonnet, rhymed abba-abba-efefef, the poem proclaims that within the tomb of the body lies a great spirit that longs to be set free. But the self that constrains that spirit is caught in the knowledge of itself: “Wretched the mortal, pondering his mood, / And doomed to know his aching heart alone.”

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