The Swerve

Every once in a while a book delights me so much that I want to clap my hands and say “Yay!” the way my one-year-old does whenever the Blackhawks score a goal. I want everyone on the planet to read this book just so they can share my excitement. Of course, tastes are so subjective that surely 90% of the population would think it’s totally boring.

Regardless, The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt inspired this “Yay!” feeling in me. Somehow it incorporates everything that my husband and have been debating about since we were teenagers. To sum it up very simply, an Italian collector of ancient texts named Poggio found a copy of Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things in a German monastery in 1417. The ancient Roman poem had been MIA for about a century, and once Poggio had some friends copy it, the text ended up influencing some of the greatest minds of the Renaissance and far beyond. Included in this exalted group: Shakespeare, da Vinci, Galileo, Botticelli, Isaac Newton and Thomas Jefferson.

The poem was controversial in its own time and in the Renaissance because it states that everything is made of atoms. The scientific aspects of it were considered heretical because it discredited the idea that God created everything. Also, Lucretius stated that there is no afterlife, and therefore there is no reason to fear death. No afterlife means no Hell, but also no need to worry about what’s left unfinished in life. You won’t be aware of these things, so you won’t care! He believed that religion was cruel because it caused fear and kept people from pursuing life’s highest goal, pleasure. He wasn’t exactly an atheist, because he believed that gods existed, but he thought that the gods didn’t give a crap one way or the other about what humans did. Oh, and humans aren’t the most important creatures in the universe. In fact, we’re not any more important than any other species. There’s no reason to believe that we’re special and that other life forms won’t exist before and after us and in other parts of the universe.

So you can see why the Pope and the Catholics during the Renaissance would have some problems with these ideas. But for me, who kept nodding my head while I was reading, it confirmed that other smart folks since ancient times have concluded a lot of the same things I have. There is something very comforting in that. I love the idea that we’re all part of this huge universe and we are just tiny particles within it. And that is not a sad thing. It’s a wondrous thing. And without religious superstitions hanging over our heads, we can be free to just enjoy the pleasures of life. Yay!

But I find myself writing this just after we’ve had a death in the family and I am faced with attending a Catholic wake and funeral. My family beliefs are very different from mine, and I will not be discussing On the Nature of Things with them this weekend! So even in 2013, most people don’t want to hear what Lucretius was preaching! And far be it from me to argue with loved ones about the beliefs that comfort them during times of grief. Everyone deals in their own ways.

But personally, I found this quote from Lucretius fan Montaigne very comforting today:

“Go out of this world as you entered it. The same passage that you made from death to life, without feeling or fright, make it again from life to death. Your death is part of the order of the universe; it is part of the life of the world.

Our lives borrow from each other. And men, like runners, pass along the torch of life.”