Author: Jorge Romeu.
Rome, June 1952. An elderly man goes to the Spanish consulate to renew his passport from a country he has not entered in the last quarter of a century and where he has only lived until he was eight years old. He falls out and dies a few days later.
The man was Jorge Santayana, a former professor of philosophy at Harvard and one of the most prominent figures in Anglo-Saxon thought in the early 20th century, still little known outside that environment. A sentence of his is addressed to those who visit today the former concentration camp of Auschwitz: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
The figure of Jorge (George) Santayana (1863-1952) from Madrid is still little known in Spain, despite being considered one of the most important names in American thought in the first third of the 20th century. The fact that almost all of his work is written in English does not justify the ignorance of someone who, in addition to philosophy, cultivated essay, poetry, literary criticism and even narrative-with a single but excellent novel, The Last Puritan (1935).
This book aims to bring closer to the person and work of Santayana, with special emphasis on the vision of his country of origin with which, despite living in it only his first childhood, always maintained ties. In fact, it never ceased to be his emotional referent, whether he lived in Boston, Oxford, Paris or Rome, all of them accidental residences of a citizen of the world who never gave up his Spanish nationality.
The author of the book, Jorge Romeu (Madrid, 1965), studied law and business law at ICADE and entered the diplomatic career in 1989. Posted to Beijing, Oran (Algeria), Havana, New York and Washington. He is the author of two essays on the United States: The Court and the Sovereigns (on the juridical-social singularity of USA) and The Faith of the Alchemist (on the Federal Reserve). He is also the author of the novel Los Ecos de un Ruido (2023).
Publisher: Colección Emily Dickinson
ISBN: 978-84-10432-17-8
RPP: 15,00 €
