![]() Recently, in “The Swerve,” Stephen Greenblatt presented the rediscovery of Lucretius’ poem in 1417 as the beginning of modernity. Lucretius was not without his contradictions (his poem begins with a hymn to Venus, although one of his central arguments is that the gods are indifferent to human life), but his great work, after being lost for centuries and rediscovered in the Renaissance, provided inspiration for Machiavelli (who laboriously copied the whole text, line by line), Montaigne and Galileo. “Happy is he who has discovered the causes of things and has cast beneath his feet all fears, unavoidable fate, and the din of the devouring Underworld,” wrote Virgil, praising Lucretius by echoing him. We should delight in the extraordinary fecundity of nature, savor simple pleasures and look forward without fear to our inevitable end. Above all, he wanted to rescue his readers from a superstitious fear of the gods and of the afterlife: We are mortal, he insisted, and our only purpose in life is to enjoy ourselves. All of this in just over 300 pages of captivating prose that weaves together innumerable insights. ![]() ![]() Two millennia ago, Lucretius wrote a vast poem called “On the Nature of Things.” His goal was to explain the workings of the universe and the history of human beings. Origin Story is a majestic distillation of our current understanding of the birth of the universe, of the solar system, of the oceans, of mountains and minerals, of all life on earth and of the driving dynamics of human culture and achievement. ![]()
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