|
ON THE NATURE OF THE UNIVERSE |
|
This book should carry a warning to the reader: it is intended to change your life. Many authors believe that their writing will make a real impact on its audience, but few imagine the sort of conversion that this poet sets as his ambition. The reader is badgered to pay attention like an inattentive child, to drink the sour medicine in order to be cured of fear and ignorance. It is, he keeps telling us, well worth the effort. Imagine, Lucretius would say, waking up one day and finding that the fear of death and all your insatiable appetites for power and pleasure had all evaporated. Imagine feeling contented and secure in a sound understanding of the universe and its physical laws such that life could spring no more unpleasant surprises, no bogey-men from the dark corners of our ignorance could attack us now that the whole universe was floodlit with knowledge of the laws of nature. Imagine being free of ambition for power, for money, for love, even for life itself. You could forgo any or all of these things without shedding a tear. You would enjoy life as it presented itself to you without hankering after more than you have been given. You would be untouchably serene, contented, wise. By the end of this book, Lucretius states, you too could have a life like this. This poem is not, then, a dry philosophical treatise written to show off abstruse clever ideas. Still less is it just a jaded poet stuck for a subject showing that he can expound Greek philosophy in Latin verse. And yet this was very much the view of Lucretius that prevailed in some circles until recently - that of a rather lacklustre hack droning on about physics. There is a great deal of argument and technical detail in the poem, and some of it is difficult, but the primary purpose of the composition is ethical rather than simply scientific. The exact nature of this ethical purpose will be examined later; but let us first look at the theory expounded here, Epicureanism.
|