`A Whiff of Impiety'

I squandered the first 47 years of my life not reading Lucretius. Almost eight years later, I see his likeness everywhere. I’ve detected traces of De Rerum Natura, usually translated On the Nature of Things, in Emerson, Darwin, Thoreau, George Santayana, Wallace Stevens, and Guy Davenport. Of Titus Lucretius Carus the man, we know little. His birth and death dates are approximate -- c. 99 BCE-c. 55 BCE. – and his manuscript history is a scholarly nightmare.

I’ve stumbled over Lucretius again reading The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, edited by Primo Levi and published in Italy in 1981. The collection is an inspired hodgepodge Levi describes as “a harvesting, retrospectively and in good faith, which could bring to light the possible traces of what has been read on what has been written.” He starts with excerpts from “The Book of Job” and concludes with a 1974 article from Scientific American, by Kip S. Thorne, on black holes. In between he packs Rabelais, Darwin, Swift, Conrad, Melville, selections from Sir William Bragg’s Lucretian-titled Concerning the Nature of Things, Giuseppe Belli, Paul Celan, T.S. Eliot, and many other other delights.

In his introduction, the translator, Peter Forbes, says baldly: “It is Lucretius who provides the link between Levi’s scientific, moral and aesthetic worldviews.” Levi worked for decades as an industrial chemist, and credited his reading of Bragg’s book at age 16 with inspiring his choice of careers. Bragg had won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1915 for development of the first X-ray spectrometer. In his introduction to the excerpt from Bragg’s book, Levi says the physicist “belonged to an epoch in which a pioneering genius could still do brilliant work in isolation.” The same, of course, was true for Levi.

Appropriately, he titles his selection from Lucretius “The Poet-Researcher” (as translated from the Latin by Sir Ronald Melville), and says in his introduction:

“If I had read Lucretius in high school I would have been enchanted, but he is not willingly read in school, officially because he is too difficult, actually because there has always been a whiff of impiety about his verses. For this reason, at the end of antiquity a cloak of silence was wrapped around him and today almost nothing is known of this extraordinary man. Consciously or not, for a long time he was regarded as dangerous, because he sought a purely rational explanation of nature, had faith in the evidence of his own senses, wanted to liberate man from suffering and fear, rebelled against all superstition, and described earthly love in lucid poetry.”

In his introduction to The Need for Roots, Forbes revels, as does Levi, in Lucretius’ proto-scientific thinking and the sheer pleasure he took in it:

“In Lucretius the world of sensation is a joy: it sings with the sights and sounds and feel of the world, with the spirit of healthy animals enjoying their animality. There is a wonderful Italian tradition of science writing that derives from Lucretius. Galileo is its greatest figure as a scientist, and Italo Calvino, Levi’s contemporary and friend is another exponent. In Levi’s case, his philosophy was put to the starkest test in Auschwitz. The result is as if Lucretius had endured Dante’s hell and emerged, a survivor, tempered by the experience.”

What I most enjoy in Lucretius is the mingling of scientific observation and speculation, and a zest for the pure physicality of the universe. The examples he cites are vivid and humble. This comes from the C.H. Sisson translation, titled The Poem of Nature, the first version I read in the fall of 1999:

“….you notice the mind suffers with the body
And shares all the sensations of the body.
If the point of an arrow, without quite killing a man,
Pierces him and damages bones and nerves,
He is likely to faint and fall limply to the ground.
Once there, as it were the tide of in his mind rises
And he feels a vague inclination to get up.
So the mind must partake of the nature of the body
Since the impact of a weapon can make it suffer.”

And this:

“In any building, if the basic measure is wrong
And there is error in judging the perpendicular
Or the level somewhere is even the slightest bit wrong,
Everything will be out of true and lopsided,
Crooked, sloping, leaning this way or that;
It will threaten to fall and some of it actually will fall
And all on account of the first erroneous measurements:
So your reasoning about things is always bound to be false
If it is based on sense you cannot rely on.”

Read these passages alongside an excerpt from Kip S. Thorne’s 33-year-old article on black holes chosen by Levi:

“From a physical and mathematical standpoint a black hole is a marvelously simple object, far simpler than the earth or a human being. When a physicist is analyzing a black hole, he need not face the complexities of matter, with its molecular, atomic and nuclear structure. The matter that collapsed in the making of the black hole has simply disappeared. It exerts no influence on the hole’s surface or exterior. It makes no difference whether the collapsing matter was hydrogen, uranium or the antimatter equivalents of those elements. All the properties of the black hole are determined completely by Einstein’s laws for the structure of empty space.”

Another unexpected admirer of Lucretius is Ron Rosenbaum, who resolved to resume his study of Latin, in part, because he yearned to read Lucretius in the original. He wrote an essay about the experience, “To the Shores of Light – Or, My First Latin Lesson,” collected in The Secret Parts of Fortune:

“…I sensed in my readings of Lucretius, through the scrim of the translation, the presence of the kind of inspired vision that reaches from the origins to the furthest limits of the universe, that links the hearts of men to the heart of creation, the kind of vision of ultimate mystery one finds in the cabalists, whose metaphors for the opening moments of creation (`the breaking of the vessels’ and the like) seem to anticipate the most sophisticated contemporary conceptions of the formation of matter in the moments after the big bang.”