(Host)Commentator Bill Mares is an educator, writer and former state
legislator whose early summer reading list includes a Kindle edition of a
standard book… about a manuscript copied in vellum… from the
original written on a papyrus scroll.
(Mares) I was absent when
my book club chose to read “THE SWERVE” by Stephen Greenblatt. What was
this, I wondered, a book about highway safety, or dancing? The answer
was in the sub-title: “How the world became modern.” That did seem a
little pretentious, like a USA Today headline.
However, praise
festooned the book like a Christmas tree. It had even won a Pulitzer
Prize for general non-fiction. Here, I thought, might be another popular
history, like Thomas Cahill’s notable HOW THE IRISH SAVED CIVILIZATION.
So I read it on my own – and I’m glad I did. The book lived up to its
acclaim as a feast of ideas and Renaissance history.
To me the
book was a re-birth of a re-birth, an almost journalistic treatment of
the re-discovery of ancient thoughts from before the Christian era. It
was good to be reminded that these ideas did not re-appear suddenly,
like Botticelli’s Venus on the sea shell. In fact, Greenblatt’s literary
device was a kind of detective story in which a long forgotten papal
secretary – one Poggio Bracciolini – and others searched for lost or
forgotten Latin manuscripts across Europe.
Bracciolini came
across his greatest find in a drafty, dank, dark monastic library in
Fulda, Germany. It was a vellum manuscript of De Rerum Natura, “On the
nature of things,” by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius.
In
college I had been bored by Lucretius’ poem, but now with Greenblatt’s
guidance it came alive for me. Lucretius, who lived roughly 100 years
before Christ, espoused the Epicurean philosophy of a relentlessly
materialist universe where gods exist but don’t interfere. Atoms, much
like our modern idea of them, are the building blocks of the cosmos.
The atoms tumble, wobble or swerve (hence the book’s title) and collide
in space. From these collisions come various complicated, sophisticated
agglomerations, including people. Nature experiments endlessly.
The message of Lucretius could have been a modern atheist’s credo: Live
life to the fullest, because there is no tomorrow, no souls, no
afterlife, no divine architect, and no intelligent design. I was
fascinated to learn that in a time of tumultuous Church politics,
Bracciolini was allowed to hunt for manuscripts like this one – so very
contrary to Church teaching.
To buttress his case for Lucretius’
modern relevance, Greenblatt contends that Galileo, Freud, Darwin and
Einstein were fans, and that Thomas Jefferson owned at least five Latin
editions of “On the Nature of Things.”
“The Swerve” is full of
detours on such topics as book collecting, paper making, libraries and
calligraphy. In the manuscript copying room of one monastery,
Bracciolini found a curse that – as a reluctant lender of books – I
love.
It goes like this: “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. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails. Let the flames
of Hell consume him forever.”