January Not Fiction Book Discussions

 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt is a book about the power of books to touch us personally and, by that means, to change the world. In 1417, Poggio Bracciolini, an unemployed papal secretary and avid rare manuscript hunter, discovered a copy of Lucretius's poem On the Nature of Things, known at that time only by references in other ancient works, in a remote German monastery. Lucretius' ideas about the nature of the physical universe and how we should conduct our lives in it, themselves influenced by the philosopher Epicurus, directly influenced many other great minds in turn, including Galileo, Montaigne, Shakespeare, Thomas Jefferson, and many modern and contemporary scientists. Greenblatt argues through entertaining anecdotes that this poem caused a swerve away from the Christian world view of the Middle Ages towards the secular and humanist world view of the Renaissance and beyond. He emphasizes how much knowledge, how many books, have been lost to the changing tastes of various cultures and ages, to bookworms and fires, as well as the fortuitous nature of this one book's rediscovery.

Greenblatt himself discovered Lucretius' poem by chance, as a student at the Yale Co-op looking for affordable summer reading. Drawn by the cover, a detail from a Max Ernst painting, he paid ten cents for it and was immediately drawn in by the intense opening of the poem. In an interview with Full Stop, Greenblatt says he was first drawn to write about Lucretius and Poggio many years later at a book conference: "I began to think about things in movement: what if you imagined culture not as something rooted deeply in the ground, occasionally disrupted, but as being constantly in movement? That the normal state was mobility, and that every once in a while things quieted down for a while and stayed where they were? That the normal condition was becoming and not being?" His theory of culture mirrors Lucretius' theory of the random movement, or "swerving," of the atoms that compose our physical universe. In the same interview, he also describes the feeling that unites book lovers across time, the power of books from other times and places to touch us immediately and personally: "Ever since I was quite young I've been fascinated by the idea that something would hit you--not just that you would find something, but that something would find you. My whole experience of what matters in literature, why it's worth spending grown-up time on, is that you can feel that even though you know that this thing was written long before you existed by someone who couldn't possibly have imagined your existence (let alone know you), that nonetheless it was written for you. If a work of literature works, it works that way, in my opinion."

What do you think? Can a poem change the world? Did this one? And will this kind of chance rediscovery of lost ideas still be possible as we move from print to digital media?

We hope you will join the discussion: Tuesday, January 8, at 6:30 p.m. at Main Library; Thursday, January 17, at 11:00 a.m. at West Ashley Branch Library; and here on the blog.