The elegance of Lucretius

A scholar named Steven Greenblatt came to KU to talk about Lucretius, a Roman philosopher who died about 50 BC. What was interesting to Greenblatt, and to me, was the fact, that the primary writing of Lucretius was essentially buried until it was rediscovered in a German monestary in the 15^th century by one, Poggio Bracciolini.

That’s a long time.

Christianity, as a world ideology and institution had something to do with the disappearance of Epicurean thought and other ideas that were heretical to Christian thinking. And according to Greenblatt, Christianity in this time period was particularly illiberal or intolerant.

So the particularly interesting part is that this major poem by Lucretius, De rerum natura, or On the nature of things, survived at all over 15 centuries and then once rediscovered, survived several hundred years more among scholars who certainly understood that the content was heretical until the Enlightenment finally allowed for competing ways of thinking.

The suggestion was made that Lucretius and his ideas survived because his writing was so elegant. The Latin, for those who could appreciate such things, was astonishingly good, if difficult for those whose understanding of Latin was lacking. The poetry was simply beautiful.

Greenblatt suggests that a kind of denial went on among the scholars: they simply ignored the parts of the poem they couldn’t agree with or perhaps they couldn’t make sense of, given their worldview; and they also told themselves that they were simply engaging in literary scholarship, as if the content was not really relevant.

How significant Lucretius’s thinking was to what Greenblatt called ‘The swerve’ to a modern worldview can’t and doesn’t need to be measured. The assumption that literature, that is the writing of those who have thought about the human condition, can have an impact on the direction of human culture seems established. We can debate the issue for our pleasure and our own enlightenment as we wish.

Considerable elements of chance are involved in this tale of Lucretius poem. And there is a  strong hint by Greenblatt that in our own time we might be unable to see what is shaping the directions of human thought with even the level of clarity that we characterize several hundred years of the development of ideas half a millennium ago – that is not so clearly.

Elegance matters. In science as well. Numerous scientists talk about the validity of a scientific theory as tied to the elegance of the math or ideas.

If there is something to all this, here is the beginning of my question: which ideas in our time have the elegance to capture the imagination of humans who will shape the direction of the main thoughts of our time and future as a human culture?

Charlie Bryan's approach

It has become apparent to me that many of us have spent much of our lives untangling ourselves from stunted thinking. There have been giants out there - clear, articulate minds, men and women who have thought deeply and persistently, who have danced around ideas  with some grace. I am pleased to have managed to stand up on my hind legs.

Along my regular walks, I met a man who had time to talk and we have become close acquaintances. The last time he mentioned anything about it, he was 81. He still manages to walk about a mile to the library, where he gives himself time to sit so that he is not overly tired when he walks back home. I often find him in South Park, reading. He reads Thomas Mann in German; Balzac in French. He has poetry on the tip of his tongue; Wordsworth is his favorite. Hemingway is about as close to contemporary literature is he will generally go. He asked me once if I favored Plato or Aristotle.

We also talk about our mutual disdain for the current state of politics – and we talk of life. I don’t have it all straight in my head, but he had a small dairy in Missouri for a while. He taught in public school for a year but didn’t like it. He worked in the kitchen at a sorority at KU and got a bachelor’s degree, I think, in biological sciences from there. He did a thesis for an advanced degree in history while living in France, but never completed his PhD. The coldest he has ever been was when he was in the Marines in Korea. Infantry. He was wounded: an inch the other way, and he would have bled to death from a severed carotid artery.

He lost his wife some time ago and has two sons. He almost always wears a flat cap, summer and winter. His name is Charlie Bryan. He’s been an atheist since he was fourteen or so.

Now I have concluded that that last bit of information is nearly irrelevant. Except that God, or at least the concept of God, is part of the human condition. But it is clear to me now that there is so very much in the human and natural realm that is more relevant. At least to me.

There is also so very much of our culture that simply distracts us from serious thinking. I certainly enjoy watching junk on ‘the tube.’ And idle chitter chatter and simple joking around can be swell at times. And if other people want to spend their lives in frivolous or nonsensical pursuits, I don’t mean to try very hard to dissuade them.

The general human condition aside - which includes all sorts of human conditions and specifies few - I intend to spend some of my time trying to come to some appreciation at least of my human condition.

God can take care of his own existence; I am simply not very interested in what seems to me to be silly religious speculations. I am interested in talking to, or reading the writings of, people who have lived, paid attention to their experience of life, have thought carefully about what they think it means, and can express themselves clearly - solidly rooting their thoughts in reality. And I intend to bring my own experience and questions and theories to the table.

This seems eminently straightforward. But to go back to this notion of the human condition which serves so admirably for making generalizations, one human condition is in part that we are so thoroughly and often distracted. In a little play on words, our lives are often played like an illusion in a magic show, that is, our attention is misdirected from what is really going on. And, to stretch this analogy further, anyone who tries to point out what might actually be going on is typically heckled.

So, the masses say, there is an elitist group of people who want to try to understand the condition we humans are in. I prefer the term, ‘smaller.’ And the masses really just want to know where they left the remote, or something like that.

So does this simple, unoriginal bit of writing get me anywhere? It’s mostly merely a reminder to check whether the path I’m on is the path I want to take. Charlie’s path makes some sense to me.

One tack of mine, which I have discovered to be problematic, is that I am prone to trying to cover too much ground. Although talking back and forth with intelligent and even articulate people and letting one thought train into the next can lead to some interesting ideas, by the time we have finished talking about quite a lot and having had a pleasant time of it, I find that I have remembered almost nothing that will be worth anything in the morning.

I am not the first to say this, I’m sure, but understanding takes time and discipline. Who knew?

The human condition as a joke

A man walked into a Aimee’s and ordered three egg crèmes from the barista and went to sit at a far corner table and when the barista brought him his drinks, he drank them all down slowly.

This happened without fail week after week.

The barista finally suggested that she could bring him an egg crème one at a time, each time he finished one, she would bring the next one fresh, with the fizz still in it.

Oh no, the man replied, you don’t understand. Two close friends of mine moved far away and we agreed that once a week we would have a drink, symbolically of course, together.

This went on for many weeks more until one day the man walked in, went up to the barista and ordered only two egg crèmes and went to sit at his usual table.

The barista and the regulars who had come to know the story of the man and his absent friends were distressed and finally agreed that something should be said.

When the barista took over the two egg crèmes, she said to the man, we’re all terribly sorry for the loss of your friend.

Oh no, the man replied, you don’t understand. My friends are both in good health. I’ve been gaining a little weight and I decided I needed to cut out my weekly egg crème.