About "The Answer Man" from the August 8 New Yorker

It’s been a long time since I’ve been really enthusiastic about an issue of the New Yorker, and a long time since a blog post originated in my notebook. But the August 8 issue, with its articles on the Roman poet Lucretius, the May 1 bin Laden assault and Oscar Wilde (not to mention a chuckleable Shouts and Murmurs about “God’s Blog”), prompted me to put pen to paper rather than fingers to keyboard.

I can’t tell you that I’d ever heard of Lucretius before, but I’ve been a fan of the article’s author, Stephen Greenblatt, since I first read an essay from his book, Renaissance Self-Fashioning in Jean Peterson’s Shakespeare Revisioned class at Wesleyan in 1999.  His Shakespeare biography, Will in the World, is my favorite work about our favorite playwright because of the author’s expressed need to make a human connection with his subject.  So I began reading because of the author, but kept reading for the connection he established with this subject, a poem titled “On the Nature of Things.”

Greenblatt begins with personal narrative about his purchase many years ago of the poem from the dime-a-book bin at Yale.  The poem, written in Latin (what with its writer being a Roman of the Republic), is a celebration of life based on the Greek philosophies of Atomism and Epicureanism (not the hedonistic pursuit of pleasure the Catholic Church turned it into, but the actual philosophy itself. If clicking on Wikipedia is too much work for you, Greenblatt quotes one of Epicurus’ disciples:

It is impossible to live pleasurably without living prudently and honestly and justly, and also without living courageously and temperately and magnanimously, and without making friends, and without being philanthropic.

Greenblatt’s engaging style makes otherwise boring topics easy to read, and in this article, that style is built on two parallel lines of connections, one implicit and one explicit.  In the implies connection, Greenblatt uses his discovery narrative next to another discovery narrative, the one in which Poggio the Florentine finds in 1417 the original text of the poem.  With his basis in Atomism (that all things are composed of different arrangements of the same tiny property – the atom), Lucretius writes, among other things, that the body is only one form of atomic arrangement (rather than some divine creation), and that the end of the body is the end of life, as opposed to some transition into an unprovable afterlife.  You can imagine that the Catholic Church, with its desire to focus its members on the next life instead of the one they’re in the middle of, would have disapproved.  Greenblatt provides one fragment of the poem and follows it with his personal take on its meaning: “to spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death is folly.  It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed.”

The poem speaks this message so clearly to Greenblatt because of his own upbringing, which makes for Greenblatt’s explicit connection.  He tells the story of his mother’s almost incapacitating fears of her own death, borne of her sister’s death from strep throat at the age of 16.  For Greenblatt’s mother, these fears manifested themselves in physical symptoms such as heart palpitations, and when she fell under a spell of emotion, either love or anger, she reminded her husband and son of her fragile hold on life.  A proof that poetry tells us what we feel is found in the sentence Greenblatt writes to follow the one quoted above: “…he (Lucretius) gave voice to a thought I had not quite yet allowed myself to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel.”  Greenblatt’s story reminds me of a friend’s mother, and shows how Irish Mother guilt is the same thing as Jewish mother guilt. When we were in our late teenage years and picked up a friend for one of our nights on the town, her last words would be, “Every time you boys go out, you put me up on the cross.  I don’t come down until you get home.”

I’d give you more about the bin Laden story (an energetic military procedural) and the Wilde biography critique, but I’ve used all my time on Dr. Greenblatt and Lucretius, so you’ll have to check out those stories for yourself.