The Swerve - How the World Became Modern - By Stephen Greenblatt - Book Review - NYTimes

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The Almost-Lost Poem That Changed the World

History can be fatal to literature. Aeschylus wrote 80 or 90 plays, and

Sophocles 120, yet we have just seven of each. Didymus Chalcenterus of

Alexandria reportedly wrote 3,500 books; not one exists today. Between

classical antiquity and us, there has been a hecatomb of words. They have been

burned, thrown away, lost to mold or pulverized. They have been rubbed off so

that vellum and papyrus could be reused. Bookworms have eaten them by the

dictionary-load.

Among the works that survived — but only just — is one so beautifully written

and so uncannily prescient that it seems to come to us out of a personal dream.

Titus Lucretius Carus’ “De Rerum Natura,” or “On the Nature of Things,” is a

7,400-line poem in Latin hexameters written in the first century B.C. It covers

philosophy, physics, optics, cosmology, sociology, psychology, religion and sex;

the ideas in it influenced Newton and Darwin, among others. Yet Lucretius

almost went the way of Didymus. In “The Swerve,” the literary historian

Stephen Greenblatt investigates why his book nearly died, how it was saved and

what its rescue means to us.

About Lucretius himself, we have little more to go on than the lurid story told

by the fourth-century church father St. Jerome: that he was born in 94 B.C.,

went mad as the result of a love potion and killed himself at 43. We can add

that he was a disciple of Epicurus, who lived 250 years earlier, and hence of the

even earlier Democritus, whose theory of atoms underlay Epicurean ideas. (The

original texts of both philosophers also didn’t make it, as a surgeon might say

with a sad shake of the head in a TV drama; we know them only secondhand.)

Democritus thought that everything was made of material particles, and

Lucretius took that as his starting point. Such “atoms,” he wrote, are infinite

and eternal; no one made them, nothing can destroy them. They hurtle through

the universe, not in straight lines — that way they could never tangle up

together to form objects — but with a minuscule “swerve” or “clinamen” in

their trajectory. Veering slightly off course, each atom bumps into other atoms

and clings or entwines with them for a while; later, their swerve carries them

away again.



away again.

Humans are made of atoms too, including our souls. If gods exist at all, they

are uninterested in us. We are free, liberated by the unpredictability of the

swerve, as are all living things. We are all connected, and when we die, our

atoms go off to join other atoms elsewhere. Death is only dispersal; there is no

need to fear any afterlife, or mutter spells and prayers to absent deities. We do

better to live by the simple Epicurean law: Seek pleasure, avoid pain. This does

not mean indulging ourselves gluttonously, but cultivating tranquillity while

avoiding the two greatest human delusions: fear of what we cannot avoid, and

desire for what we cannot have. One extraordinary section describes the

frenzies of lovers, who exhaust themselves futilely trying to possess one another.

The beloved always slips away. Instead, we should step off the wheel and

contemplate the universe as it is — which brings a deep sense of wonder, rather

than mere resignation or gloom. “What human beings can and should do,” as

Greenblatt summarizes it, “is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they

themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the

beauty and the pleasure of the world.”

It was an attractive philosophy, exquisitely expressed, and a few decades later

Ovid enthused that “the verses of sublime Lucretius are destined to perish only

when a single day will consign the world to destruction.” A world without

Lucretius seemed unimaginable — yet that was just what nearly ensued. All

ancient copies vanished, except for a few charred scraps in a library at

Herculaneum. Some medieval copies circulated, but these too mostly expired

from neglect or deliberate destruction, for Epicurean philosophies were

uncongenial to Christianity. At last, in 1417, probably in the southern German

Benedictine abbey of Fulda, one stray ninth-century copy caught the eye of a

Renaissance book hunter from Italy, Poggio Bracciolini.

Sarah Bakewell is the author, most recently, of “How to Live: Or, A Life of

Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 23, 2011

A subheading on Oct. 2 with a review about “The Swerve,” Stephen

Greenblatt’s account of the legacy of the Roman poet Lucretius, referred

incorrectly to the Renaissance humanist Poggio Bracciolini, who was




instrumental in preserving Lucretius’ writings. He sought out manuscripts of

ancient authors for scholarly reasons; he was not a “book dealer.” The error was

repeated in the Editors’ Choice column on Oct. 9.

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Poggio saw the manuscript’s significance at once, presumably knowing of

Lucretius from Jerome and Ovid. He had a copy made and sent to a friend in

Florence, who copied it anew. (That copy survives; both Poggio’s and the

original have gone down Didymus Gulch.) Two more copies would turn up in

Leiden 200 years later, but for now Poggio’s was alone, and it spawned more

copies. With the advent of printing, it spread even farther and won more

admirers. Among 16th-century readers was the French essayist Michel de

Montaigne, who filled his copy with annotations, including one suffused with

obvious delight: “Since the movements of the atoms are so varied, it is not

unbelievable that the atoms once came together in this way, or that in the

future they will come together like this again, giving birth to another

Montaigne.” It was one of those “rare and powerful” moments, as Greenblatt

writes, when a long-dead author seems to reach directly through time to a

particular reader, as if bearing a message meant only for that person.

Another such magical moment would occur some 400 years later, when the

young Stephen Greenblatt himself picked up a 10-cent copy of Lucretius for

vacation reading. He too was amazed by how personally it spoke to him. Such

encounters have become central to the philosophy Greenblatt has elaborated in

several decades of work as a literary historian and theorist of the “new

historicism” in literary studies. It combines hardheaded investigations of

historical context with a profound feeling for the way writers somehow pull free

from time, to enter the minds of readers. “I am constantly struck,” Greenblatt

told The Harvard Gazette in 2000, when he was named a university professor,

“by the strangeness of reading works that seem addressed, personally and

intimately, to me, and yet were written by people who crumbled to dust long

ago.” It is a rich literary paradox: authors are embedded in history, yet they

slip away; they time-travel.

The voyage of “De Rerum Natura” through time traced an hourglass shape: it

billowed, then dwindled, then billowed again. At the waist of this hourglass



billowed, then dwindled, then billowed again. At the waist of this hourglass

stands Poggio, and his life forms one of the main narrative strands in “The

Swerve.” We follow him from his modest birth in 1380, through a glittering but

ill-fated career at the Vatican to an insatiable life of manuscript collecting. It

made him rich, yet his love for books was Epicurean in the sense once conjured

up by Petrarch, another collector: “Gold, silver, jewels, purple garments, houses

built of marble, groomed estates, pious paintings, caparisoned steeds and other

things of this kind offer a mutable and superficial pleasure; books give delight

to the very marrow of one’s bones. They speak to us, consult with us and join

with us in a living and intense intimacy.” This intimacy is one theme of “The

Swerve”; its alarming fragility is another.

What saved Lucretius for us was a “swerve” of sorts; apparently bent on

oblivion, his poem abruptly changed course and found its way back. Similar

uneven lines of chance are involved in bringing individual readers to particular

books; an accident throws a work in our path or an odd sentence catches our

eye, and the book becomes a lifelong companion. Again, the lines are rarely

straight. As Greenblatt writes, the story of Lucretius’ text is one of “forgettings,

disappearances, recoveries, dismissals, distortions, challenges, transformations

and renewed forgettings.” It could have finished Lucretius off — but we are

lucky. The “vital connection” goes on. The intimacy and the fragility still go

hand in hand, and Lucretius lives to breathe at least another few breaths.

Sarah Bakewell is the author, most recently, of “How to Live: Or, A Life of

Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: October 23, 2011

A subheading on Oct. 2 with a review about “The Swerve,” Stephen

Greenblatt’s account of the legacy of the Roman poet Lucretius, referred


instrumental in preserving Lucretius’ writings. He sought out manuscripts of

ancient authors for scholarly reasons; he was not a “book dealer.” The error was

repeated in the Editors’ Choice column on Oct. 9.

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The Swerve - How the World Became Modern - By Stephen Greenblatt - Book Review - NYTimes