(Originally posted to Google+)
As a part of my reading list project, I’ve decided to write a bit about
each of the books I read this year. Below is my attempt for the first
book “The Swerve – How the World Became Modern”, by Stephen Greenblatt.
This was the ideal book to begin my reading with, but part of me wishes
that I’d read it later, once I’d had a chance to refresh my writing
skills. What I’ve written below doesn't begin to do it justice.
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It
seems I could not have picked a better book with which to start my 2012
reading list project. The Swerve - How the World Became Modern by
Stephen Greenblatt was not only a riveting and informative read, it
inflamed my interest in Ancient Rome and Greece, the Enlightenment, and
the sources of the ideas that define “modern” life. It is non-fiction,
but told in a story style with noted liberties taken to embellish and
provide context where the facts fail to provide the whole story.
The
“hero” of the story is Poggio Bracciolini, a humanist of the 1400s: a
man obsessed with rediscovering and reviving the literature and the
learning of Ancient Rome. Being as it was around 1000 years after the
fall of Rome, this was an exceptionally challenging task. Poggio was in a
unique position among his contemporaries. Access to monastery
libraries, the main repository for ancient learning, was severely
restricted, but as a high-level servant of the Pope, Poggio was able to
obtain it. Even when granted access, the seeker of ancient literature
required the patience to page through archives of un-indexed texts, a
talent for deciphering the often terrible handwriting of monks, an
ability to differentiate between Ancient Latin and the Latin of the day,
and a particular familiarity with the writing styles of the authors
sought. Poggio was adept at all these things.
It is an
historical irony that monasteries were the main preservers of ancient
learning. Monasteries did not encourage inquiry or discussion; in fact,
these were forbidden. Monks read and recopied books by rote. They were
not to ponder or discuss, merely to preserve, spending painful hours
deciphering and recopying ancient texts by hand so that all trace of
them might not rot away. The most valuable of Poggio’s discoveries came
in 1417: an epic poem written around 50BCE called “De rerum natura” or
“On the Nature of Things”. Its author was Titus Lucretius Carus, a Roman
philosopher, writer and disciple of the Ancient Greek philosopher
Epicurus, whose ideas centered on the pursuit of pleasure and
tranquility and the avoidance of pain.
This poem laid out a
number of astonishingly “modern” ideas (Keep in mind that it was written
50 years before the birth of Christ.) It describes a creator-less
universe that consists entirely of eternal, invisible particles in
constant motion in an infinite void. It states that this universe was
not created for humans, nor are humans unique in it. It denies the
existence of an afterlife, and claims that the highest goal of human
life is the pursuit of pleasure and the avoidance of pain. It states
that the greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain, but delusion:
superstitious fear and misguided ideas about what can and should be
obtained.
The rediscovery of this poem and its ideas had a
profound effect on human history. It directly influenced the works of
Thomas More, Machiavelli,Galileo, Thomas Jefferson, Freud, Darwin,
Einstein and untold others. It helped to shape the Renaissance and
thereby the world today.
