'I Would Have Been Enchanted'

We think Titus Lucretius Carus died on this date, October 15, in 55 B.C. at roughly age forty-four. We know he wrote the philosophical poem De rerum natura, usually translated On the Nature of Things. Though read less often than other Roman poets, Lucretius can be traced in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Santayana, Wallace Stevens and Guy Davenport. 

I’ve stumbled on him again while reading The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, edited by Primo Levi and published in Italy in 1981. The collection is an inspired hodgepodge Lev 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.” Included by Levi are selections from Sir William Bragg’s Lucretian-titled Concerning the Nature of Things (1925).

 

In his introduction, the translator, Peter Forbes, writes: “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 sixteen 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. 

 

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, 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, De Rerum Natura: The Poem of Nature (1976): 

 

“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.”