319. The Swerve: How the World Became Modern
Rating: ☆☆1/2
Recommended by:
Author: Stephen Greenblatt
Genre: Non-Fiction, History, Philosophy
356 pages, published September 4, 2012
Reading Format: Audio Book
Summary
The Swerve tells the story of the last surviving manuscript of an ancient Roman philosophical epic, On the Nature of Things, by Lucretius—a poem containing dangerous ideas: that the universe functioned without the aid of gods, that religious fear was damaging to human life, and that matter was made up of very small particles in eternal motion, colliding and swerving in new directions. The copying and translation of this ancient book inspired Renaissance figures including artist Botticelli, shaped the thought of Galileo, Freud, Darwin and Einstein, and influenced writers Montaigne, Shakespeare and Thomas Jefferson.
Quotes
“What human beings can and should do, he wrote, 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.”
“The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire—the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows—and gnawing fear. Even the dreaded plague, in Lucretius’ account—and his work ends with a graphic account of a catastrophic plague epidemic in Athens—is most horrible not only for the suffering and death that it brings but also and still more for the “perturbation and panic” that it triggers.”
“The quintessential emblem of religion and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core is the sacrifice of a child by a parent. Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.”
“The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone.”
“In short, it became possible – never easy, but possible – in the poet Auden’s phrase to find the mortal world enough.”
“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.”
“We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or our bodies a moment’s peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day.”
“I am,” Jefferson wrote to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean.”
“The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views.”
My Take
While there are lots of interesting ideas in The Swerve, I found it pretty dense and a little boring to plough through. It would have benefited from a more engaging writing style.
