8/4/2019 The Swerve
1/2
September 27, 2011
An Unearthed Treasure That Changed ThingsByDWIGHT GARNER
THE SWERVE
How the World Became Modern
By Stephen Greenblatt
Illustrated. 356 pages. W. W. Norton & Company. $26.95.
The literary critic, theorist and Shakespeare scholar Stephen
Greenblattsnew book, The Swerve: Howthe World Became Modern, is
partly about an obsessive book collector, and it begins,
appropriatelyenough, with a book purchase of the authors own.
In the mid-1960s, when he was a student at Yale and searching
for summer reading, Mr. Greenblatt cameupon a prose translation of
Lucretius 2,000-year-old poem On the Nature of Things (De
RerumNatura). He plucked it from aYale Co-opbargain bin for 10
cents, partly because he liked its sexy cover, apair of disembodied
legs floating above the Earth in an apparent act of celestial
coition.
Mr. Greenblatt read On the Nature of Things that golden summer.
The book spoke to him for a reason
thats straight out of a Woody Allen movie or aBruce Jay Friedman
novel: because of his own overbearingJewish mother. The core of
Lucretius poem is a profound, therapeutic meditation on the fear of
death,and that fear dominated my entire childhood, Mr. Greenblatt
writes. It wasnt a fear of his own demisethat troubled him. It was
his mothers absolute certainty that she was going to be stricken at
anymoment.
Shed stop on the street, as if about to keel over from a heart
attack, and ask the young Mr. Greenblatt totouch the vein pulsing
in her neck. At moments of parting there were operatic scenes
offarewell.Mama, enough with the drama! you can practically hear a
weary Mr. Greenblatt bleat.
This is a warm, intimate start to a warm, intimate book, a
volume of apple-cheeked popular intellectualhistory. Mr.
Greenblatt, a professor of humanities at Harvard, is a very serious
and often thorny scholar, afounder of a discipline calledthe new
historicism. But he also writes crowd pleasers likeWill in the
World(2004), his best-selling biography of Shakespeare.
The Swerve, like Will in the World, brings us Mr. Greenblatt in
his more cordial mode. He wears hisenormous erudition lightly, so
lightly that most readers will forgive him for talking, at times, a
bit down tothem. This book is well-brewed coffee with plenty of
milk and sugar stirred in; its a latte, not an espresso.
The ideas in The Swerve are tucked, cannily, inside a quest
narrative. The book relates the story ofPoggio Bracciolini, the
former apostolic secretary to several popes, who became perhaps the
greatest bookhunter of the Renaissance. His most significant find,
located in a German monastery, was a copy ofLucretius On the Nature
of Things, which had been lost to history for more than a thousand
years. Itssurvival and re-emergence into the world, Mr. Greenblatt
suggests, was a kind of secular miracle.
Approaching Lucretius through Bracciolini was an ingenious idea.
It allows Mr. Greenblatt to take someworthwhile detours: through
the history of book collecting, and paper making, and libraries,
andpenmanship, and monks and their almost sexual mania for making
copies of things.
The details that Mr. Greenblatt supplies throughout The Swerve
are tangy and exact. He describes howone of the earliest versions
of a fluid for repairing mistakes on a manuscript Whiteout 101 was
amixture of milk, cheese and lime. He observes the hilarious
complaints that overworked monks, theirhands cramped from writing,
sometimes added to the margins of the texts they were copying:
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/dwight_garner/index.html?inline=nyt-perhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/dwight_garner/index.html?inline=nyt-perhttp://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/dwight_garner/index.html?inline=nyt-perhttp://yale.bncollege.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/BNCBHomePage?storeId=16556&catalogId=10001http://yale.bncollege.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/BNCBHomePage?storeId=16556&catalogId=10001http://yale.bncollege.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/BNCBHomePage?storeId=16556&catalogId=10001http://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Kisses-Bruce-Jay-Friedman/dp/0226264165http://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Kisses-Bruce-Jay-Friedman/dp/0226264165http://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Kisses-Bruce-Jay-Friedman/dp/0226264165http://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_newhist.htmlhttp://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_newhist.htmlhttp://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_newhist.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/books/review/03TOIBINA.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/books/review/03TOIBINA.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/books/review/03TOIBINA.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/books/review/03TOIBINA.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/books/review/03TOIBINA.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/03/books/review/03TOIBINA.htmlhttp://bcs.bedfordstmartins.com/virtualit/poetry/critical_define/crit_newhist.htmlhttp://www.amazon.com/Mothers-Kisses-Bruce-Jay-Friedman/dp/0226264165http://yale.bncollege.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/BNCBHomePage?storeId=16556&catalogId=10001http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/g/dwight_garner/index.html?inline=nyt-per
8/4/2019 The Swerve
2/2
The parchment is hairy; Thin ink, bad parchment, difficult text;
Thank God, it will soon be dark;Now Ive written the whole thing.
For Christs sake give me a drink.
Mr. Greenblatt reprints a curse that one monastery placed in its
manuscripts upon those who neglect toreturn books. Some readers, I
suspect, will wish to write it in their own books, perhaps even
this evening.It begins: For him that stealeth, or borroweth and
returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change
into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with
palsy, and all his members blasted. Itgoes on: let bookworms gnaw
his entrails; Let the flames of Hell consume him forever. Amen,
brother.
This books pumping heart is Mr. Greenblatts complicated
reckoning with Lucretius masterpiece. It is apoem of startling,
seductive beauty, he writes, yet one that is also recognized as a
bold work ofphilosophy, one that helped recalibrate thinking when
it began to recirculate during the Renaissance.
Among those who admired and drew from it were Galileo, Freud,
Darwin and Einstein. Thomas Jeffersonowned at least five Latin
editions of On the Nature of Things, as well as translations into
otherlanguages.
On the Nature of Things was filled with, to Christian eyes,
scandalous ideas. It argues eloquently, Mr.Greenblatt writes, that
there is no master plan, no divine architect, no intelligent
design. Religious fear,Lucretius thought, long before there was a
Christopher Hitchens, warps human life.
An admirer of Epicurus, Lucretius had the nerve to link pleasure
with virtue. By pleasure he did not meanhedonism, exactly; he meant
living a full life that included friendship and philanthropy and
fundamentalhappiness.
He also argued the philosopher George Santayana would call this
the greatest thought that mankindhas ever hit upon that all matter,
including human beings, is made up of atoms that are in eternal
andswerving motion.
Yeats called one passage in On the Nature of Things the finest
description of sexual intercourse everwritten, which is no mean
praise. Montaignes essays contain more than 100 quotations from
Lucretiuspoem.
Lucretius speaks across the millenniums because he offers the
power to stare down what had onceseemed so menacing, Mr. Greenblatt
writes. Human beings, as transitory as everything else, should
jettison their fears and embrace the beauty and pleasure of the
world.
Lucretius played down the beauty of his own poetry, Mr.
Greenblatt observes, comparing his verses tohoney smeared around
the lip of a cup containing medicine that a sick man might
otherwise refuse todrink.
Its possible to admire Mr. Greenblatts book while wishing it
contained more of the boldness andweirdness he admires in
Lucretius. Mr. Greenblatts prose, charted on a Geiger counter,
would registermostly a state-of-the-art air-conditioners steady
hum. I found myself longing for a few more unsettlingspikes of
intellect and feeling. You wont be bored by The Swerve; neither
will you be on the edge of your
seat.
There is abundant evidence here of what is Mr. Greenblatts great
and rare gift as a writer: an ability, toborrow a phrase from The
Swerve, to feel fully the concentrated force of the buried
past.
