Life, the Universe, and Everything

by

Nicki Leone

When human life lay foul before men's eyes,
crushed to the dust beneath religion's weight
(from the high realm of heaven she showed her face
in hideous grimace of terror to mortal men)
a man of Greece first dared to raise the eye
or mortal against her, first stood ground against her.
Not all god’s glory, his lightning, heaven’s rumble
and rage, could stop him; rather they rasped his heart
to keener courage, and made him a pioneer
eager to burst the bolts on nature’s door.

--Titus Lucretius Carus, On the nature of things Book 1, lines 62-71

In the preface to his new book, The Swerve, Stephen Greenblatt writes that he stumbled on a copy of an English translation of De rerum natura, On the nature of things, by accident—drawn to the battered little book in the university co-op bookstore because of its strange cover (a painting by Max Ernst) and its ten cent markdown price. The opening lines, a hymn to Venus, gave him more than his ten cents worth:

First goddess, the birds of the air, pierce to the heart with your powerful shafts, signal your entry. Next wild creatures and cattle bound over rich pastures and swim rushing rivers: so surely are they all captivated by your charm, and eagerly follow your lead. Then you inject seductive love in the heart of every creature that lives in the seas and mountains and river torrents and bird-haunted thickets, implanting in it the passionate urge to reproduce its kind.

It’s the kind of thing that might well catch the attention of a bored college student, but it’s an unlikely beginning for a poem dedicated to explaining the classical notion of physics.

My own introduction to Lucretius was just as haphazard. After a rather momentous experience listening to a performance of the Iliad, I had taken to scrounging for audio recordings of other classical texts. These I would load up onto my iPod and listen to as I walked my dog through the woods, fields and marshes near my home. Picking up shells to Horace, tossing the dog sticks with the words of Virgil ringing in my ears. And I remember wading through the swamp, looking for empty scallop shells, when Lucretius’s On the nature of things came on.

It was, as Greenblatt found, both beautiful and startling. My translation, by Rolfe Humphries, wasn’t his translation but as Greenblatt says the power of the work resides perhaps as much in the listener and reader as it does in the writer, and “it is nonetheless possible to have a powerful experience of a work of art even in a modest translation, let alone a brilliant one.” Standing barefoot in the muck of a rising tide while the dog pulled at his leash, nosing at dead crabs, I had just such an experience with Lucretius. It came, I remember, when he offered as evidence that all things—even solid things like rocks and walls—were composed of empty space, the fact that one could hear sounds from another room, even when the doors were closed.

Then, as if this prescient observation weren’t surprising enough, he went on to insist that all things were in motion—even things we perceive of as at rest and still—and noted that this must be so, for otherwise nothing would ever decay or fall apart. And besides, we could see such motion on a small scale, at least, by watching the tiny particles dancing in the beams of sunlight that pour through a window into a dark room:

For watch whenever the bright rays of the sun
pour shafts of light into a darkened house:
you’ll see a thousand motes a thousand ways
commingling in those very shafts of light,
engaged in battle and blow as if in strife
eternal, host against host, without pause,
uniting, dividing, swiftly, again and again;
from this you may conjecture of what sort
is the endless movement of atoms in the void.

I don’t, as a rule, have any expectations when I am in one of my “classics” moods and listening to, or reading, Latin poetry. I’m neither an expert nor a scholar, just someone, like Greenblatt all those years ago, looking for something to read. Greek and Latin poetry (always in translation) is a desultory pleasure. So I’m inclined during these moments to simply let the words wash over me—allowing some to drift off, some to alight, some to sink in and set my mind thinking—rather like those little motes swirling in the sunlight. Lucretius calls it a “swerve”—when one mote changes direction slightly and crashes into another, which then gets knocked off course and crashed into something else, and so on. In that swerve, he says, is the origin of free will. It’s a heady thought.

Still, lack of preconceptions or not, I wasn’t expecting to discover a poem that laid out the universe as I knew it—that envisioned it as the result of infinite and spontaneous combinations of atoms moving endlessly in empty space, where matter is neither created nor destroyed but simply combined and dissolved in an endless variety of forms. Brownian motion, a grasp of the idea of conservation of mass and energy—these were not concepts I was expecting to find in a poem written about hundred years before the birth of Christ.

I was in awe. And in awe, also, because of the language. Even in translation it was incredibly beautiful. I am eternally beguiled by the notion that epic poetry in hexameter verse might be the proper métier for philosophical and scientific discourse. It’s one of the reasons I like Virgil’s Georgics so much. It’s a poem about farming. There are verses about treating mange on sheep and testing the soil for acidity. Both are described very vividly.

Thus it is with De rerum natura, which is awash with things like motes dancing in sunbeams and the crashing salt spray of the sea against cliffs. Or, passages which chide us to remember the limits of our own senses thus:

Things we could see may often fail
to reveal movement when placed some distance from us.
For often upon a hill the fleecy flock
cropping lush lands move slowly where the grass
bespangled with fresh dew calls invitation,
and lambs with bellyful frisk and tease and nudge;
our distant view sees this all run together,
a patch of white pinned bright upon the deep green hills.

Which is a much more wonderful way to say “things lose focus and detail at a distance.”

Lucretius’s De rerum natura was very nearly lost to history because it aroused the ire of people in positions of political and religious power for its denigration of the use of fear to control the populace, and its dismissal of religious practice and ritual as “superstition.” Lucretius was an Epicurean. It is a word that has a pallid, watery meaning today, generally used to refer to someone who likes good food. One of the websites where I catalog my favorite recipes is called  “Epicurious.com.”

But an Epicurean in the time of Lucretius was a person who followed the teachings of Epicurus. It held that the only life was this life, that there was no reward or punishment in an afterlife, that the gods cared nothing for the world and did not answer prayers or intervene in events on behalf of men. That the soul, whatever it was, died with the body. That the only way to live a good life was to avoid pain, seek tranquility, and be free of fear. Epicurus was, in other words, a materialist and a rationalist. And Lucretius is his most eloquent disciple.

Naturally, this philosophy that rejected divine intervention went over like a ton of bricks with the Roman politicians and priests whose state-sponsored temples and rituals lay at the foundation of much of their political power. And all the more so when the Republic gave way to the Empire, and the Emperor was declared to be inherently divine. The increasingly dictatorial nature of the Roman state, coupled with its generally militant nature and its stoic, rigid sense of morality pushed Epicurean philosophy into disfavor. Its practice died out altogether under Christian rule, which regarded any philosophy that denied the existence of Heaven and Hell, or the immortality of the soul, to be the worst kind of wicked heresy. (Christian authorities also weren’t too thrilled with the Epicurean idea that if a person felt sexual desire, it should be acted upon, just as when a person feels hungry, he should eat something.)

Stephen Greenblatt’s The Swerve: How the World Became Modern documents the rediscovery of Lucretius’s De rerum natura in the early fifteenth century by an out-of-work Italian humanist in a remote German abbey, and follows the ripples the discovery caused as this radical book was copied and disseminated throughout Europe. It’s a good story, full of corrupt popes, ancient manuscripts hidden in isolated German monasteries, political intrigue, satirical and often pornographic verse, and some truly furious arguments over the niceties of Latin grammar—which on at least one occasion degenerated into an out and out fist fight between two old men who had obviously completely lost their sense of perspective. As it turns out, ideas, like atoms, are never truly destroyed. The least little swerve can cause them to crash together and burst from their previous course, over-spilling their banks and flooding the countryside.

That might not be quite what happened with Lucretius, but Greenblatt makes a good case for the irrepressible appeal of De rerum natura to centuries of scholars and thinkers. Some, like the book’s re-discoverer, Poggio Bracciolini, were simply humanists and book hunters, interested in finding and preserving as many classical texts as possible. Others, like Thomas More, held the book in a kind of horrified awe—recognizing its beauty and wisdom, but unable to accept its central precepts. Some, like Montaigne and Thomas Jefferson, found in Lucretius’ philosophy something so profound it seemed to inform every part of their life. And while it might be stretching credulity to see, as Greenblatt seems to, a straight line between the discovery of Lucretius’s poem and the way Thomas Jefferson chose to write the Declaration of Independence—where one of the inalienable rights of all men is the blatantly Epicurean idea of “the pursuit of happiness,” still there is no question that De rerum natura was one of Jefferson’s favorite books. He apparently owned eight copies.

For many men through many ages, On the nature of things was a voice of reason in the wilderness of fear and superstition. The poem is, in fact, unbendingly hostile to people and institutions which use fear to exercise control, and unforgiving of people who submit to such fear. It had profound implications in the fifteenth century, when the rise of Renaissance humanism was paralleled by the rise of increasingly strident religious movements where corruption often rubbed shoulders with fanaticism and manifested in a bloodthirsty cruelty. It’s hard not to hear the same strident, near-hysterical echoes of fear in the public discourse today.

Greenblatt found some comfort in what he calls the poem’s “extended meditation on the nature of death”—something he had a life-long experience with thanks to a melancholic mother. “Art always penetrates the particular fissures in one’s psychic life,” he notes. But for me, the thing that held me riveted, ankle deep in tidewater as the recitation of the poem finally finished, was not Lucretius’s scathing commentary on religion, the afterlife, or the ridiculous notion (his words) of an eternal soul. It was, instead, his sense of the greatness of the universe—its infinite nature with its infinite diversity, its limitless possibilities. I was overwhelmed by the idea that two thousand years ago there lived a man in a country halfway around the globe, who looked out at the world and saw what I saw.

Lucretius writes that it is silly to think that the universe was created for the benefit of mankind, that we are not the center of or raison d’être of creation. But this, far from being a troubling thought, is a comforting one to him. That we are just one thing in a universe of infinite and amazing things, and that we have only ourselves to look to, to answer to, only ourselves to be responsible to. That to be good, we need only to choose to be so. We swerve, like the atoms, under our own inclinations. And all around us the atoms of the universe swerve and dance.

Books mentioned in this column:
Lucretius: The Way Things Are: The de Rerum Natura of Titus Lucretius Carus, translated by Rolfe Humphries (Indiana University Press, 1968)
On the Nature of Things by Titus Lucretius Carus, translated by Frank O. Copley (W.W. Norton, 2011)
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt (Norton, 2011)

Nicki Leone showed her proclivities early when as a young child she asked her parents if she could exchange the jewelry a well-meaning relative had given her for Christmas for a dictionary instead. She supported her college career with a part-time job in a bookstore, or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that her college career and attending scholarships and financial aid loans supported her predilection for working as a bookseller. She has been in the book business for over twenty years. Currently she works for the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance, developing marketing and outreach programs for independent bookstores. Nicki has been a book reviewer for several magazines, her local public radio station and local television stations. She was one of the founders of The Cape Fear Crime Festival, currently serves as President of the Board of Trustees of the North Carolina Writers Network, and as Managing Editor of BiblioBuffet. Plus, she blogs at Will Read for Food. She manages all this with the loving support of varying numbers of dogs and cats. Contact Nicki.