Thanks awfully, gentleman! I'm beginning to feel that as I spend more time here, I shall certainly write more. Your idea about the recorder, Godfrey, is an idea I've had but have not implemented. Initiative and discipline; the very things I need. And not presumptuous in the least! I'll post more lines as they come to me.
-josh
Oh, no! Sorry, I meant The Swerve. His previous book was Will in the World, which was my first of his. A biography of Shakespeare, and nothing to do with Epicurus. The Swerve, for all its many faults, genuinely captivated me. Greenblatt reveals the architecture of a solid materialist foundation beneath Lucretius' frequently erroneous didactics.
It's true, for example, that Lucretius has the size of the sun all wrong. But what's more important was the brilliant insight that the Earth was merely one world among many in an infinite and centerless universe. These errors (minor quibbles when compared to the groundless cosmology of the Academics) are nevertheless obstacles to the modern mind in approaching the Epicureans. The texts by Greenblatt and DeWitt are foremost among those attempting to clear those obstacles, and while DeWitt's work is more useful and more important, Greenblatt's work is far more accessible to the general reader.
That was a reference to Stephen Greenblatt, who was a Shakespeare scholar and Norton Anthology editor to me, before he was anything else. We were assigned his earlier book in a college course on Shakespeare.
Griffin's reading of the De Rerum Natura is the finest reading of any poem I've ever encountered. His rendition of Book I is haunting! Someday I'd like to bite the bullet and start working through a good audio Latin course.
Thank you, Cassius.
I am Joshua, a native of Sioux City, Iowa. I'm a long-haul trucker with a BA in the humanities (a double major in History and English Literature, more specifically).
My early education was concerned mostly with history and political theory, but I was an early reader of the stoics, picking up the Meditations in the same week as my high school graduation. In the years that followed I diverged from history in my pleasure reading. I got into Thoreau rather heavily, reading everything he ever published, and followed that thread through Walden to the East. Having long since abandoned the Catholicism of my boyhood, I began to devour the great scriptures of the world--the Bhagavat Gita, the Upanishads, the Dhammapada and the sutras of Buddhism. The Chinese classics; Analects, Tao Te Ching, Chuang Tzu. In the meantime I had the opportunity to travel; to Greece, to Italy, to the British Isles.
I began to feel in the end that my own Frank denial of metaphysical idealism and the supernatural were incompatible with this reading. I was an "internet atheist", and without a home East or West. I had, of course, known by then of a materialist school that had flourished in Greece for a time, but its hedonism was repugnant to my sensibilities. I had never read its works.
When a Harvard Professor I quite admired (from Will in the World) wrote a book on Epicureanism, I was intrigued. I read it. I read it again. I ordered a copy of Lucretius and read that; and when I soon after read the seminal work of Norman Wentworth DeWitt, I was converted. It was strange; I had been to Herculaneum. To Athens. How had I missed all this?
I consume a lot of audiobooks on the road, but there are four paperbacks by my bed. One is Walden. The other three are Lucretius, DeWitt, and Frances Wright. I, too, am an Epicurean!
Strange star! Light, lingering in the West, whoso
Wouldst gleam this eve o'er silken river and
The silt hills, and thread the hanging grotto
Of dew-laden boughs with thy shimmering strand--
You, who call forth the sun upon the morn,
Setting fire to heaven, spreading light
And vital heat to the meridian!
In wondrous light all things on Earth are born,
Reared, and given to passionate delight
In the sweetness of life!
Cytherean
Maid, keep you by night to some secret
Tryst? Awaiting a youth handsome and bold
To steal over the garden wall and get
Your hand in his, and kiss you as he holds?
O Venus, you! Whose ancient light deceives
Me not, skating along the face of things,
For I know its weft, and find it delved deep
In the roots and bones of Earth. Thy reprieve
Falls sweet--Tarry here, counsel me to sing
Of old seeds of truths grasped, and pleasures reaped!
The lamp of Vesper hangs still, a pale urn
Watering our sleep with light and dewy dreams;
But the motion of all things is return--
Sink, and rise again. I trace thy gleam
Wandering, alighting waves far past my sight,
And sail thy wake on craft of human thought.
Stars do not shine that men may calibrate
Their instruments--float on! But my delight
Shall be to wash on Grecian shores, where taught
A sage long past whose simple truths abate
All Earthly fears.
That man, a Greek, fallen
Into mortal memory--to stardust
And starlight, scattering in the swollen
Void those atoms that were the scene of lusts
And terrors long conquered--Searching out the
Grounds of wise choice and avoidance, he lived
In this world a match even for gods
In happiness. His voice echoes to me
Across the centuries; he has contrived
A path of wisdom, pleasant still to trod--
A path incorruptible, laid forever.
Good evening, all! My name is Joshua, and I'm rather new around here. I've been an Epicurean for some few years, and I have occasionally been possessed by the notion to write a longform materialist poem in English. In my vision (forever out of reach) this would correct the two major deficiencies in Lucretius; first, the many (albeit generally trifling) mistaken scientific hypotheses in his poem. And second, the temporal disadvantage that separated him from the death pangs of pagan philosophy and the subsequent brutal intolerance of revelation.
To make a long story short, I began such a poem by degrees but soon found the rhyme and meter burdensome. I may add to it further, or start again in blank verse as time allows, but in any case I'll post it here for your perusal. I am desirous of letting it out for several reasons. For one thing, because I shall be pleased to have feedback! But I offer it as encouragement also; in the hope that some here will be pleased to know that there is a quiet, brooding literature in the world, unknown to you but not altogether unconnected. (To be continued...)
