Book Highlight ~ The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt

Books that had fallen out of circulation and were sitting in German libraries were thus transformed into wise men who had died and whose souls had been imprisoned in the underworld.

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With all the snow and ice closing everything down, I thought it would be a good time to read The Swerve by Stephen Greenblatt, which I have wanted to tackle for quite a while. However, since the book is primarily a story about the Epicurean poem, ​On the Nature of Things, written by Lucretius over 2,000 years ago, I figured I should read the original work first. It would be like reading Hamnet without knowing anything about Hamlet...I'm sure you would be fine, but it's nice to know what people are talking about.

Let's put the nerdiness of this whole endeavor to the side for a second and say that both these works were highly enjoyable reads. Lucretius lets the reader know that he is going to write about substantive topics, but do so in a lyrical style because "since this philosophy seems to be a bitter pill to swallow, and the throng recoils, I wished to coat this physic in mellifluous song, to kiss it, as it were, with the sweet honey of the Muse." And he's right, it makes the read pleasant and even funny at times. 

As for The Swerve, it is about the rediscovery of Lucretius' poem, written in a very literary style.  However, the book is much more than that narrow story. Greenblatt uses On the Nature of Things as a throughline to tell the development of Western Civilization, and the messy struggles that were necessary to advance knowledge and culture. The author takes us from the great writers of Rome, through the Christian destruction of the classical world (which reminded me of the excellent book The Darkening Age which you should also check out), to the humanist book hunters of the Renaissance, and ends with the story of those facing new repressions during the Inquisition.

The book is not written as straight history. The reader is taken along on a journey to uncover the past through the story of this poem, its near death, the very fallible people who sought to save it, and the "dangerous" ideas that gave it knew life in our modern world. Reading this book felt much like reading Ian McEwan's What We Can Know or Geraldine Brooks' People of the Book​, both of which I highly recommend.

Therefore nothing turns to nothing. All things decompose
Back to the elemental particles from which they arose.

His craving to discover and to liberate whatever noble beings were hidden in the prison house had evidently only intensified. He had no idea what he would find; he only  knew that if it was something ancient and written in elegant Latin, then it was worth rescuing at all costs...Of course, all Poggio could hope to find were pieces of parchment...[b]ut for him these were not manuscripts but human voices. What emerged from the obscurity of the library was not a link in a long chain of texts, one copied from the other, but rather the thing itself, wearing borrowed garments, or even the author himself, wrapped in graveclothes and stumbling into the light.

As for Lucretius' work itself, the poem is a classic example of Epicurean philosophy, and a very modern perspective of the world having been written in the 1st Century BCE.  Greenblatt describes the poem as, "yok[ing] together moments of intense lyrical beauty, philosophical meditations on religion, pleasure, and death, and complex theories of the physical world, the evolution of human societies, the perils and joys of sex, and the nature of disease." He notes that Lucretius' ideas about the universe and atoms should not be unfamiliar to modern readers, "at least among the circle of people who are likely to be reading these words," but that the ideas are still foreign to many who willfully turn away from scientific truths.

I'm not going to pretend to be learned enough to go on and on about this classic, but I will tell you I enjoyed nerding out in this little corner of human history for a while and I think you might too. 

The mind seeks explanation. Since the universe extends
Forever out beyond those ramparts at which our world ends,
The mind forever yearns to peer into infinity,
To project beyond and outside of itself, and there soar free.