The Swerve 

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Room in him and him and i thought kennedy will delight in the year fourteen seven two italian scholar plucked an old manuscript off the dusty shelf in a remote monastery the scholar bujold gradually was a renaissance book hunter 's greatest zero what would you give was stared out ancient texts to collect them and have them copied the book he held in his hands was composed by a roman poet name increases it was a book length poem entitled on the nature and and it had been lost to history for thousand years on the nature of things is quite ignoring me and your work and if the contention of stephen greenblatt rediscovering this and putting it back into circulation influence the course of the intellectual and cultural history of western civilization professor greenblatt is a renowned scholar teaches english at harvard and is the author of a best-selling book about shakespeare wheel in the world this time he's written a book about what could seem like an obscure subject the recovery of an ancient manuscript a rich but difficult poetic work but stephen greenblatt has written this book with the city and with an abiding passion for the subject is book is called this worker how the world between modern i recently sat down with stephen greenblatt who was in the studio on the harvard campus before we begin hearing is giving us a taste of the creases so captain.

Light of humankind thoughts about parent of rome pictures queen of love cycle power air persons who supplies and reads various born in rome skies for every time by the prolific mike springs holds the regions like the goddess the clouds and tempests fear that by placing presence this year for the land and fragrant flowers dress for the notion smiles her weekly press in heaven itself with more serene shoreline is less.

Lesbian when you begin in the preface book that is describing how you actually came cross your copy of creatures and paperback books for sale at university work possibly ten cents tell me the story of how you came across on the nature of things i used to go at the end of the year to the campus bookstore to see what they were basically all but giving away throwing an huge bins and i would rummage through them and try to find things that i might want to look out over the summer but i had a very limited budget at the do it and one year i came upon a paperback called on the nature of things buys out and lucretius neither title nor the author were familiar to me but had a very interesting cover which was a detail from a painting by the surrealist painter max and steve that showed oh two pairs of legs up in heaven doing something he couldn't tell what and it was on sale for ten cents ten cents was not nothing but it even back in those days it was a modest price and i decided to risk my ten cents for what looked implausible of the book of ancient physics but that had a startlingly interesting cover and that's how it all started for me i went home sometime over the summer picked up the book expected to look at you page seven get bored but i was immediately seized by gripped by it and i continued to my amazement all away through the feeling that strange feeling one has the sometimes in one's life in which someone from distant past seems to be speaking directly to you as a real liberal i'd love to know what it was in those lines that first captivated the undergraduate who'd picked the book up in a secondhand bookshop while i was amazed i suppose as i still am amazed i confess was not only a question of youth and age though i certainly am older now that it to experience that sense of ecstatic love the universe is basically put together on the principle of eros of love that everything that exists is that the passionate impulse to reproduce as lucas puts it that seems to knit together all of the universe in the spring and it will get some of the same feeling from the beginning of justice canterbury tales are other places the seem to be the most powerful version before he understood much about what the philosophy was in this for the anything about it i just responded to the excitement of a universe that's come alive with some frenzied desire that we felt the frenzied desire more when i was eighteen seventeen in effect i do now but still i'm in touch with bullets amazing it is it it is so poetically you said the philosophy of the biblical physics are supposed to be but it comes across the meeting at leawood with israel all the bells ringing him in a in a much more poetic fashion absolutely admits a it's a strange paradox ball because this is a poem that begins with the extravagant him to the goddess venus the goddess of love but it's a poem that actually has long been accused of atheism and in fact in which the poet seems to have very very great doubts that any thing that a human being could possibly say could ever reach the gods even if they existed so there's a paradox built into the poem built into this opening which is the greatest ancient hymn to venus comes in the poem that says that prayers to the gods are absurd and meaningless because of the gods exist they only take pleasure in themselves and their own existence and could have absolutely no interest in anything that we say over there so many things with the pulmonary fascinating and one is that it was literally missing hard it is disappeared for centuries and really was written in the first century b.c.e. only discovered in fourteen seventeen bytes sent and this is a wonderful book to a book hunter training told jill albrecht shalini i believe is yes that's a florentine school of was pretty looking for book something that people did actually back in the fifteenth century looking for books that had good reason to look for books and because many many many of them had disappeared and of course the great preponderance of the ones that disappeared never came back that lucretius 's poem was around for several centuries and read care are traces at least of the very serious reception and admiration in which he was held by contemporaries like cicero or virgil there are records of emperors asking for copies of the poem assigns that wealthy roman aristocrats powerful men and i sat around in lazy afternoons when i have some time and read this poem talked about the meaning of life but then at a certain point when things begin to fall apart for the roman empire this poem among many other things disappears in this poem disappeared also for good reason because the pagans didn't have a stake in it as it denies it affect the effectiveness of any pagan cults of the gods the jews didn't have a taste for the division of the universe inspired by an erotic frenzy and the christians despised it because it's idea that pleasure was the pinnacle of of all that is good in the world seemed very very alien to the early christians who put together their religion but it wasn't the only book that was missing from what you indicate in your book it was it was part of the majority very very few books of survivor that there was a great disappearance call that a the libraries were shuttered dozens locked up eventually simply fell into ruins the rain fell to this the roof and wash the ink off the old viruses that were library 's were burned the paper was used for the purposes to wrap fish or the other less appealing things the people who read the books were carted off to slavery or die dog the education system fell apart the schools were closed the world was increasingly run by the people for whom literacy had virtually no meaning that warlords of various groups who had no interest in keeping up the old books and so what had once seemed very important and busy enterprise how to hold on to the legacy for the romans how to hold onto the legacy of greece as well as their own cultural legacy and the intensity with which libraries were filled with the classics by sophocles or aeschylus and euripides or plato or aristotle or hear lucretius that whole world basically collapsed they must've thought of the certain point it would go on forever the way we think it goes on forever are our hard-fought cultural inheritance but it doesn't have to go on forever to fall to pieces and it did for the pieces in the fifth six seven centuries after the christian era when the roman empire collapsed and one consequence of the collapse was a massive erasure of the inheritance of the ancient past something we often call the dark ages yes i was of course easy to exaggerate and one of the impressive things about the scholarship of the last century or more is that it's recovered considerable amount of traces of things that had survived that even through the darkest part of the period of chaos and disruption that they were above all survivals in monasteries because for a set of odd and fascinating reasons monasteries that though devoted of course utterly to the service of christ that nonetheless became repositories of pagan texts at certain numbers in any case copied this is things fall apart eventually copied every few hundred years say in order to keep them going and it's to that act of copying that we owe not only the survival of creatures but the survival of virtually anything from the ancient past everything that we get from the ancient past is a result of someone copying it again and again often in a very dark time let's talk for a bit about pull jill brooke giuliani who am almost becomes the hero of your book of lucretius 's post front and center but for just such an endearing him and really attractive character why do i get carried away with the torture virtually i became fascinated by cultural mobility by what means the subject comeback when you think it's gone forever is part of a world of people small world but intense people who became obsessed with this project of finding out what if anything had survived from the ancient world and where does he find lucretius defies egregious the way most people find these it found such texts in a monastery that probably monastery in germany probably fold although there are are debates about where he might've found it he himself didn't reveal the name of the monastery refound this particular text either because a letter was lost and she said it work if this is likely because he hope to go back sometime and didn't want to tell some of his competitors could seize part of the world in which lots of people are ferreting around for this he didn't want to tell him where his particular goldmine was why were the third and around her and would live with it looking the rich to beat did they sell these to patrons who have lots of money or with with this blog was a certain amount of money involved it was an odd way of trying to get rich and no one actually made a huge fortune on it but you could get same from it and the receipt the same from it is that starting in the fourteenth century with the great figure of the great talent poet petrarch there was an increasing interest in the possibility of recovering the lost glories of the ancient roman world that what had been somehow over very many centuries comfortably lost people began to think might be found people who in any case increasing uncomfortable about the fact that it was at all disappeared they saw the ruins around them of course as you can see the ruins around you today in italy they knew that there was once a remarkable civilization they knew they were living in its in its disjointed dismembered ruins and they began to think we could get this back there were people who thought they could wordpress it in the physical objects digging up old statues that begins precisely this people start digging in finding statues instead of instead of burning them down for building materials were building the walls that begin to look at them and admire them and copy them and then there are people who get interested in the books and think we could find some of these books that we know existed and we have seen for centuries as i mentioned before the dark ages this is what we call the rené saltz such the rebirth of classical civilization that's what they like to call it medication like to think of themselves as part of a rebirth to some extent course it's a cultural myth everyone has ways to make themselves feel good at puncher virtually probably found a copy of lucretius listed in the catalog of the monastery so that is not exactly finding it in the cave by the dead sea at another words there were people who would kept these allies had copied them that catalog them and get from poachers point of view and the point of view of people like him humanists in italy in the fifty centuries a call from cells that they thought that they were coming on the world of barbarians would kept their heroes in prison and they were liberating the heroes bring them back to the free air of civil conversation with the other with the poem itself but which is a work of what is poetry it's also philosophy and it's also physics so what does lucretius layout for the reader lucretius was a follower the greatest roman follower of the greek philosopher epicurus epicurus lived from the middle of the fourth century before the christian era that probably enough he was born around three forty one before the christian era and he died in two seventy questionnaire before the christian era sorry that so epicurus was a philosopher who was himself following the school of philosophy is a great master was a earlier philosopher named democritus and he stood for whole philosophical system but that system which came comes out west comes that was on was entirely through lucretius as his prince before that's a safe we don't know all that much about that epicurus himself and even less about democritus because berkeley all of their works have disappeared and not come back very small number of them to short the text by epicurus some fragments that also have been recovered some recovered from the charred manuscripts after the volcanic directions around pompeii and so forth but basically nothing and lucretius is a miracle because he followed the system passionately he gave it a profound and poetic articulation in the first century before the christian era and it's from lucretius that we really understand fully what this philosophy is it's a philosophy that starts with the idea that the universe is made up out of an infinite number of invisible particles in invisible and indivisible as the greeks imagined the greek word for the indivisibility of particles was adam that's not a word actually that's lucretius himself uses he likes to give them roman names rather than retains latin names rodriguez but that's the core idea the core idea is that the universe must consist everything that is from our bodies to the ground beneath our feet to everything that we see that must consist of infinite numbers of tiny particles that somehow bound together in different forms and shapes that they came to this realization would've the advantage of the electron microscopes are new things of modern times ahead out how did they come to decide that the universe was the host of these afro score of basic units is a fantastic speculations in apartment of course there was no empirical proof of this also more than two thousand years well more than two thousand years so it was a fantastic speculation competing with other speculations it just happens that the speculation turns out to be closer to the truth of things than than its competitors and how they came up with was to deductions unbelievably clever daring deductions from some very chewier and obvious observations if you lie down as they did as we do and look at a beam of son sunlight filter your window you see little tiny things dancing in it best notes and that's one thing they began to think about how is it what is what is it what does it mean that there are thousands and thousands of little tiny things that we normally don't see but that when the light is exactly right you can see in a shaft of sunlight or how is it that smell of perfume reaches your nose when you don't see it in the year or how is it that when you put your clothing next to the ocean but not in the water i sit you come back in an hour so your clothing is damp what's seen in visibly from one thing to another and what does it mean the things passing visibly and there are number of different theories have is to be but the theory that democritus and his followers came up with visibly epicurus was that there must be invisible particles and then they began to think about what it means that they would be what would follow from this idea and it really was what followed from the idea that is the exciting part because after all the universe has to consist of something so there were many competitive competing theories about what it might be but it was what followed from the idea of atoms that is both exciting and disturbing and here's some of things that follow them first of all they notice that motion that i just mentioned when you look at the dust modes and they thought what was this means that everything even though we don't see it in motion that everything that exists is in some sense in motion but nothing is perfectly still that even though it feels still look still as the table before us the grounding their feet what if it's actually made up out of considering movement and what if those atoms are eternal and that mean if the answer and movement and their eternal victim part but they can't be destroyed if they can apart bill come together again in different forms that everything exists consists of what is eternal but is constantly reshuffled into new forms and shapes so that's one set of thoughts that come from this second hold my thoughts has to do with what would make it shuffle about someone is some directing it is someone putting it together that we don't see and they came up with the fascinating and too many people still terrified thought that it didn't need a creator or designer what it needed was time that the universe had an infinite amount of times they thought if the atoms were eternal then eventually anything that could come to exist could come to exist about how complex the system that he didn't need that unintelligent design and that everything could exist simply because of the random movements what they called the swerves of the atoms banging into each other at four this on imaginable length of time i visited all loses of the theoretically ancient philosophy going back.

I guess to the democritus of this it sounds painfully modern all posted times and it is it it has residents for some deluding of 21st-century even though he was back for centuries before the christian era absolutely call that's for me initially and still get eerie part of this attacked that that makes it still gives me a very strange on this physical sensation of surprised that that so many things that seem at least part of our inception of the universe of things we grapple with many cases part of our conception of the universe were already articulated that such a long time ago millennium ago the idea of the nature constantly ceases the experiments that it's filled with annotations and transformations lucretius thought for example that there must because of this there must be constant experiments and new species that the must of been other species in the earth before we existed as humans or anything that we see around us that there will be other species after we ceased to exist that what happens he thought is that if nature comes up in this peculiar way of constant experimentation with creatures who can adapt to the way things are fine food are able to reproduce are able to take care of a young those creatures will survive at least for a certain period of time the species and then the universal change situation will change for them and the mill ceased to exist as he came up with effectively the core of what darwinian natural selection argues that this is two thousand years ago he was also some who believe that there must've been there must be other universes other or other solar systems of the planet 's other forms of life for the sake he thought that the universe as a whole cosmos was not created for humans the humans were not unique or not at the center of things and the earth was not unique in the center things that there were many sons and there would be many planets around bosons and they must be other universes that he thought that the idea that everything depends on our fate that the gods are watching what we do was a species of pure delusion americans on the part of human beings that whatever meaning human beings would have they have to find for themselves in this life and not find it in the scheme of an afterlife given to them by god or even green the author of this word how the world came on this is ideas on cbc radio one across america on sirius satellite radio one fifty nine and around the world on the web and paul kennedy stephen greenblatt teaches english at harvard is a shakespearean scholar with a passionate interest in the renaissance was drawn to write about the recovery of a lost manuscript of poland by the roman poet priestess called on the nature of things and how that it was placed back in circulation helped change the actual cultural climate of her.

Focus for a while one of this word which is the title of the book is its attorney used to characterize this not well written is it random or is it not these these atoms littered a bouncing around and bumping into one another is there a pattern to this or is this completely random and arbitrary of course the universe he thought is full of beautiful pattern things he saw as everyone sees as we all see that the universe is absolutely startling in its order he could observe as we do that no matter how small you get how close you look when you look at and insects look at the crystalline structure of a rock you see pattern so they must be in that sense design in things but he thought that the principle that underlay the design was effectively the random movement of the items he thought the atoms that some items could connect to other atoms in some atoms can't connect the design as the atoms move some items are good it and linking to other atoms some items that are not good at connecting to those particular items in other words he had some notion didn't have the notion the periodic table some notion that the eat that the atoms they were limited number of types of atoms and they were of different designs and somewhat more easily onto others and that helped to account for the diversity of things also for the limits of sizes of things you could get enormous things the small things but there wasn't an unlimited size of things because of the nature of the structure of the universe but he didn't think that they had to be at someone designing the subject he thought it was important to understand that there wasn't a design because of if everything was determined he thought that there would be no freedom at what he thought was that the swerving of the adams was called in latin the cleanup man like our word declination or inclination that clinton and the movement of the items was random and therefore allow for the possibility of human freedom with free because we cannot be determined by the divine scheme of things that i consider there could be at least two possible responses to this kind of worldview one would be yes this is very liberating it's free and very exhilarating yet it could be that is absolutely terrified that ship that we we know nothing and can know nothing and are just creatures of of of irrational forces.

Well yes you are right though lucas would have said we can know nothing someone like montaigne in fact released at times in his life in the city century said yes the consequence of this is to basically know nothing but lucretius actually thought we could know quite a lot about the structure of things that it was important to understand for example he thought that disease played for example which was a preoccupation of course in the ancient world must be caused not by the gods shooting mysterious things that you because to punish you for one crime or another but by invisible agents invisible substances atomic substances in the air that were entering you as he didn't have the term are term that the virus or infectious disease but have effectively the idea that they would and we could understand that he thought just as you could understand thunder and lightning cocaine doses over the was a great believer in most of his excavation so make any sense or say longer than he was a great believer in the idea that you could come up with a scientific explanation for things of that since he thought you could actually as a human being understand a great deal about the universe he thought on the other hand that most of what people thought was the explanation of things having to do with schemes have with the gods or demons were delusional and what you said a second ago i was actually true that some people thought it was liberating to think that for example lucretius thought that you had a soul but he thought that the soul is made up of atoms for your body was made up of atoms and it would come apart and you came apart and therefore the idea that there was to be an afterlife but you could be punished or rewarded was ridiculous that the stories of people rolling rocks up the hill it is the specific sisyphus in the underworld of tantalus trying to reach for something to drink that these were ridiculous ideas to frighten people that is what methods was liberating but a contemporary lucretius cicero said in response to this very idea of epicureanism me said look that only superstitious old people believe in those stories about the rocks in the first after the in the afterlife with lucretius and appears the saying is that there is no afterlife and cicero said effect that's the good news is that but though it of course you're actually right people that look all know one running for office high office in the united states and i daresay in canada could run on all of the principals in lucretius there they would seem to people unbearably bleak but he understood them not to be unbearably bleak but to be liberating for you to face what you need to face to be a free human being liberating and beautiful finds them absolutely stunningly attractive and that that's it one of the things he did strange things he did lucretius was to put all of this philosophy into absolutely magnificent poetry which was not a an obvious thing to do is master tomas epicurus wrote in prose and actually expressed great disdain for poetry i spit on poetry is one of effusive surviving sayings of epicurus he thought that his theory should be put in very clear ordinary prose lucretius put it in magnificent poetry why why in part at least for the reason you just said which is that he finds anyone see you to find this idea of the universe incredibly beautiful even things that are frightening thunder and lightning even at the end of the poem the terrible idea of a plate in the and in the city 's imagined matters not welcome defining a way of getting it poetic form.

If you go to google but in the put you back in the string you do it yourself in the book he described very movingly your your relationship with your mother and how your mother spent all of her life will like that you knew her being terrified about dying this this despite the fact that she lived into her nicely so it was a long-term fascination and fear of death out yet how does that factor into the way you responded to lucretius everyone comes that the things that they care about through with their own roots and my roots in this case was as i write through my upbringing which was.

A wonderful one in many ways i had a wonderful loving mother and father but my mother was in the grip herself all their life shortly saw the life that i knew were a terrible fear of death she lost the younger sister at six years old my mother was just a few years older to strep throat the time that the year before penicillin was introduced and would've taken care of this that quite easily but her lovely sister died and my mother felt that the pain of this for her entire life and it seems to instilled in my mother a sometimes unbearable fear of death and fear for own talking so i grew up with is a writer don't don't want to represent myself as a suffering soul i wasn't quite happy soul and them now but i grew up in a house that was painfully in the grip of this anxiety that my mother had that about herself she she had as she imagined that the terrible frailty she thought she was going succumb to probably a heart attack or stroke she would stop when she walked a few steps you wouldn't allow herself to run she would have me touch her neck to feel the throbbing vein in it she would embrace me when she was going off for a while i was going off for while as if this was our last farewell so i had a lot of love from mike i says it with the verdi was reflected a lot of operatic farewells in much other than and of course it was painful i love my mother and care about her and worried about her is she worried about herself and when i read lucretius for the first time i felt a great week of this lifting of increases is very powerful about why you absolutely must not should not do not have to fear death why you can be freed from the sphere he focuses on the liberation from the fear of death of of punishment in the afterlife but that wasn't what my mother was wearing about it was extinction that she was worried about but increases is a great poet about being able to face extinction disappearance we formation and something else and for me that voice spoke and still speaks very very powerfully to me would it work for your mother did you ever shared lucretia oh i don't think so paul i think i think it is i didn't try the case may be i was a fool not to but i was too old baby when it came to me to try i was already away and out of the orbit of my household i suspect.

That.

My mother had to struggle with his without this consolation if it is a consolation i think she would've found this account she would been probably the sister of missing from this account to bleak for her but for me it was at least at the as a young man reading this it was freeing and now that i'm not a young man i still find it free i don't welcome the prospect of my dissolution so it's not as if i'm looking forward to it but i don't feel it waiting for me and that i don't has to do with with the fact that this vision of things spoke to me so powerfully you find it liberating you also find it important intellectually important in the and this is one of the basic pcs out of your book swerve on if this is this kind of thinking helped to create the modern world i believe describes it sounds completely muttered software but but what caused the change how was instrumental in bringing us out of those dark ages and into modernity but certainly wasn't instrumental in an instantaneous way and as i said still isn't set because was still arguing about these principles are popular public culture even if our scientists are arguing about many of them when it came back into the world pledger bartolini found the poem in fourteen seventeen euros fifty centuries so in fourteen seventeen to him grace any of these principles to say oh i think the universe is made up of atoms and void and nothing else i think that the universe has no creator and designer i think that everything came into being because of the random swerve from atoms to say these things would've granted you is either insane or wicked or both and would probably lead to a exceedingly early demise that so perhaps not at the top of of of higher burning logs to create exactly is so as you can imagine no one virtually no one in portugal's world in the fifteen century in the boardroom itself lived very long like no one including a joke embraced these propositions and eighty direct way immediately and fascinatingly to me quite thrillingly what you have is people interested in the poem initially as they see immediately it's incredibly beautiful poem so it turns out in this case that it's poetry it's artistic power is not simply a form of decoration it turns out to be essential to the survival of the work and to its that spread because initially it wasn't because the idea seemed copperheads about the people but because it's beauty was apparent that the work began to circulate first in florence in circles of these humanists and then beyond this the immediate circles of florence once the work passed from manuscript that were the manuscripts to print in the later part of the of the fifteenth century the copies began to spread but even then of course they wouldn't the ideas wouldn't embrace what you get is first of all artists feeling something powerful and we started our conversation talking about this the artistic power that opening the vision of venus and we know at least one person who responded in minsky powerfully to the vision and that is something botticelli the great florentine painter because botticelli 's great paint the primavera and his birth of venus are signs of the reception of lucretius 's palm beach circulation once again after a more than a thousand year absence in the world but think about that and about the fact that some of the greatest painting in the west the greatest paint and we know surges up from the recovery long before people can articulate the ideas from artists intuiting something immensely powerful in this work and in the late sixties century you get finally someone like giordano bruno great dominican philosopher says yes these ideas are in my way of thinking reading us to the truth that there must be more than one world at the earth is not the center of the universe that the soul is not immortal but and so forth and so on and bruno was earned at stake for space to become safe really tilt even knew and had to be very careful galileo certainly had to be very careful but even later isaac newton had to be careful about how much of this he could articulate zone it takes really hundreds of years before the ideas fully percolate into the public view it's just too dangerous but these names are listing are all people who were influenced by lucretius absolutely none more than the great philosopher of the late sixty 's and shriek that i'm sure the montaigne the person who would affect thinks most deeply about what is to be a human being speaking about himself and about what one uses a creature but then not just montaigne who holds lucretius all the time and success to them but lots of other figures early scientists like galileo and duke early philosophers begin to see as spinoza died since descartes guys as hobbes does not want to sign on to all the propositions but begin to see that you have to grapple with them you also wear the hat of the great shakespearean scholar talk for a while about the influence of of lucretius on with shakespeare the influence of it exists at all would the fugitive difficult to find and certainly difficult to prove we don't know whether shakespeare had actually sat down and read lucretius we know that his friend and colleague rival and johnson had a copy of lucretius in fact that copies in my university 's library with joss 's handwriting on it and others did in england and other people to change their what is known like john florio the translator of montaigne shakes are certainly did read the shyster may have got some of this via montaigne or from florio or from talking to johnson only may read lucretius that would have been translated into english at that point but chester had sufficient latin to read the poem at in any case there are peculiar signs in these to my was picking up its presence in shakespeare take for example r j percival is a famous and marvelous moment in romans eleven which mercutio has a fantastic speech about queen mab murphy remember the speech absolute at the way in which you dream of fantasies that you have well it's very difficult to read that speech after reading lucretius and not think that shakespeare had been inspired by lucretius was the creatures has an account of the way fantasies work that is it even us in the succession of moving from one occupation to another that is very close to what you expect us with mercutio screen that speech but then even more deeply than that in r j shakespeare takes stories he so often does this been in circulation as of the versions and all those other versions the italian versions the chase was drawing upon and then the english adaptation of those italian versions focus on romeo juliet 's prospects for an afterlife together possessed the characteristic of the story and its characters have lots of these love stories r j dye in this earth but they anticipate that in the next world they will be united and shakespeare takes that out and throws it away he insists that romeo juliet 's life is in this world and that what will happen when that life that ends is that they'll spend the rest of time until a decay in a tool but there is no imagined afterlife in which the social i did not which he takes out those elements that are incompatible with increasing vision and insists instead that this is the world in which whatever will mean for romeo juliet will have its meaning this is the world in which they will have their love and what ends in this world in its but shakespeare there and indeed in much of his work that refuses the imagining of an afterlife is not unique assault actually universally george's pretty does imagine cleopatra have at least ethically better themselves imagine that they will have an afterlife together whether we imagine not but it's very striking that were mutually exclusive and he has many other moments king lear is another great play this kind in which he strips away the prospect of an afterlife and focuses on the that the animals that we are here but therefore campbell that we are in this existence and how do you see this were being worked out in contemporary culture and society but where do you see evidence of lucretia thinking lucretia but increasing poetry and in in the world we live was a say first of all we have lots of difficulty coming to terms with with the whole picture arrived at we are still struggling with how to absorb not simply lucretius but how to absorb what we take to be the nature of things uses term for it now so that darwin is a good case in point not so long after darwin propounded his ideas and of the origin species that they were remarkable set of lectures by so many nintendo in belfast in northern ireland and the cheeks he was a follower of balance and he said i think prophetically that we must find a way of conveying this vision of things which is the truth as simple believe of our existence of the nature of our existence in all the species we must find a way of conveying this to a broad public otherwise they'll respond in fear and rejection he must be able to convey what's exciting apostle about this not only what is alarming were disillusioning about it and we still struggle as we know them as a culture and coming to terms as we live in a world in which our footballers when they throw up a forward pass it succeeds often look up and give thanks as if there was a mysterious god who follows football and enables them to connect with a wide receiver and we must know when some part of her salsa system but we can't live without this set of ideas and after all we are the enlightened ones much of the rest of the world is in the grip of a set of of often quite murderous beliefs about the truth of their dogmas that i think it's still profoundly important to free ourselves from so that's the first to say that said that there's another happier history of some which i write about my book that already in the eighteenth century people who cared about this enlightenment humanist tradition included some of the founders of my own country including thomas jefferson who decided to use the very very surprising and momentous phrase instead of life liberty and property life liberty and the pursuit of happens as the purpose of our union and the pursuit of happiness is an essentially epicurean sessions accretion idea and in fact thomas jefferson owned five copies of lucretius 's poem was a wonderful lap missed loved lucretius wrote about himself as an epicurean so we actually have the smoking gun in this case that at the in the very formation of the idea of the american republic is a core of epicureanism seleucus is alive is alive and well and living all over the world today is alive and well he's it he's in our inheritance from albert einstein who wrote a very nice didn't need increases for his own physics and mathematics but who appreciated what lucretius it done and wrote a very nice introduction to german translation of lucretius he's alive in the inheritors of darwin and he seemed alive in the inheritance of our painting and dance sculpture poetry.

For him to.

Want to listen to stephen greenblatt professor of english at harvard and author of this word how the world came on it's published by norton and distributed in canada by paying thanks to the good folks in the public affairs office at harvard university for these there's the producer for ideas was richard have technical operations by date were on facebook look this up add us to your friends are webmasters liz not the interim executive producer of ideas is short i'm okay stay tuned now for news cbc radio one and sirius satellite radio one.

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