Tallulah by Tallulah Bankhead

In late summer of ’51, idling on my acres preliminary to my return to England, I started talking into a recording machine, one of those contraptions which operates a two sided record, each faceted to absorb a half-hour monologue. The disc can be started and stopped on whim. Once a platter is completed, its content can be played back to its startled author. This device fascinated me- I could address it at length without fear of interruption or reprisal.

I poured a lot of words into that whirligig. Once I was so careless as to impose two successive recitations on each face of the record, one on top of another. Mary Resnick, who undertook to unscramble the resulting bedlam, had to be put to bed in a dark room with ice packs on her temples. More than once I set the disc to spinning, talked into it for a half hour, only to find later I had failed to release the voice intake. For thirty minutes I had been talking to myself. Conversations broke into this narrative which had nothing to do with this chronicle. An irrelevant dialogue with Edie Van Cleve took up one side of a record because I had neglected to turn off the voice inlet while we debated the advisability of bathing Doloras, my Maltese. Transcribing the records, Miss Resnick blanched when one of them erupted a long discourse on the life and times of Evelyn Nesbitt, for love of whom Harry Thaw ventilated Stanford White. “What are you going to call the Evelyn
Nesbitt book?” Miss Resnick wanted to know. Once my first sentence was waxed, I knew I’d see my life through, though the graves yawned and the heavens burst. I may temporize and back and fill on the edge of a new experience but once I’ve plunged in, I’ll wrestle it to a decision, win, lose or draw.

I muted such alarms as nibbled at me. Was I presumptuous in thinking anyone could be interested in my story? Would I be wiser to ape the shoemaker and stick to my last? How much could I tell without outraging the living or smirching the dead?

Last parts of the Swerve

The Roman curia was, from a moral perspective, a notoriously perilous place. The atmosphere he breathed is most brilliantly conveyed by a strange work of the 1430s, written when Poggio was still very much at the center of the curia. The work, entitled On the Excellence and Dignity of the Roman Court, is by a younger humanist contemporary, the Florentine Lapo da Castiglionchio. It is a dialogue, in the style of Cicero, a form much favored at the time by writers who wished to air controversial and even dangerous views without taking full responsibility for them. Hence, at the start of Lapo’s imaginary conversation, a character called Angelo-not Lapo himself, of course, heaven forbid-violently assails the moral bankruptcy of the curia, a place “in which crime, moral outrage, fraud, and deceit take the name of virtue and are held in high esteem.

And, given the huge sums that are paid for bits of paper with papal seals, What fantastic profits are reaped! The place is a gold mine. There is no need any longer to affect the poverty
of Christ: that was necessary only at the beginning in order to avoid the imputation of bribing people to believe. Times have changed. and now riches, so essential for any important enterprise. are in order for whoever can acquire them. Priests are allowed to amass all the wealth they want; they only have to be poor in spirit. To want high priests actually to be poor, rather than the immensely rich men that they are, displays a kind of "mindlessness.”

So the dialogue runs on, with deadpan seriousness and wide-eyed enthusiasm. The curia, the friends agree, is a green place not only for serious study but also for lighter amusements such as gaming, horsemanship, and hunting. Just think of the dinner parties at the papal court- witty gossip, along with fantastic food and drink served by beautiful, young, hairless boys, And for those Whose tastes do not run in the direction of Ganymede, there are the abundant pleasures of Venus. Mistresses, adulterous matrons, courtesans of all descriptions occupy a central place in the curia, and appropriately so, since the delights they offer have such a central place in human happiness. Lewd songs, naked breasts, kissing, fondling, With small white lapdogs trained to lick around your groin to excite desires and all for remarkably low prices.

This expansive enthusiasm for outrageously corrupt behavior and the frantic pursuit of wealth must be a sly satirical game. Yet On the Excellence and Dignity of the Roman Court is a very peculiar satire, and not merely because its gushing praise for what the reader is presumably meant to despise evidently took in some contemporaries. The problem is that when he wrote the work, Lapo was busily seeking appointment in the curia for himself. It is possible, of course, that he felt ambivalent about his attempt: people often despise the very institutions they are frantically trying to enter.

On More's Utopia and Bruno:

In fact, Catholic intellectuals could and did engage with Lucretian ideas through the medium of fables. Though he complained that Marullo sounded “ just like a pagan,” Erasmus note a fictional dialogue called The Epicurean in which one of the characters, Hedonius, sets out to show that “there are no people more Epicurean than godly Christians.” Christians who fast, bewail their sins, and punish their flesh may look anything but hedonist, but they are seeking to live righteously, and “none live more enjoyably than those who live righteously.”

If this paradox seems like little more than a sleight-of-hand, Erasmus’ friend Thomas More took the engagement with Epicureanism much further in his most famous work, Utopia (1516). A learned man, deeply immersed in the pagan Greek and Latin texts that Poggio and his contemporaries had returned to circulation, More was also a pious Christian ascetic who won a hair shirt under his clothes and whipped himself until the blood ran down his flesh. His speculative daring and his relentless intelligence enabled him to grasp the force of what had surged back from the ancient world and at the same time his ardent Catholic convictions led him to demarcate the boundaries beyond which he thought it was dangerous for him Or anyone else to go. That is, he brilliantly explored the hidden tensions in the identity to which he himself subscribed: "Christian humanist.”

Utopia begins with a searing indictment of England as a land where noblemen, living idly off the labor of others, bleed their tenants white by constantly raising their rents, where land enclosures for sheep-raising throw untold thousands of poor people into an existence of starvation or crime, and where the cities are ringed by gibbets on which thieves are hanged by the score without the slightest indication that the draconian punishment deters anyone from committing the same crimes.

That depiction of a ghastly reality-and the sixteenth century chronicler Holinshed reports that in the reign of Henry VIII, 72,000 thieves were hanged--is set against an imaginary island, Utopia (the name means “No-place” in Greek), whose inhabitants are convinced that “either the whole or the most part of human happiness” lies in the pursuit of pleasure. This central Epicurean tenet, the work makes clear, lies at the heart of the opposition between the good society of the Utopians and the corrupt, Vicious society of his own England. That is, More clearly grasped that the pleasure principle-the principle given its most powerful expression in Lucretius’ spectacular hymn to Venus-is not a decorative enhancement of routine existence; it is a radical idea that, if taken seriously, would change everything.

More set his Utopia in the remotest part of the world. Its discoverer, More writes at the beginning of the work, was a man who “ joined Amerigo Vespucci and was his constant companion in the last three of his four voyages, which are now universally read of, but on the final voyage he did not return with him.” He was instead one of those left behind, at his own urging in a garrison at the farthest point of the explorers’ venture into the unknown.

Reading Amerigo Vespucci and reflecting on the newfound lands known, in his honor, as “America,” More seized upon one of Vespucci’s observations about the peoples he had encountered.“Since their life is so entirely given over to pleasure,” Vespucci had written, ”I should style it Epicurean.” More must have realized with a jolt that he could use the amazing discoveries to explore some of the disturbing ideas that had returned to currency with Lucretius’ On the Nature of Things. The link was not entirely surprising: the Florentine Vespucci was a part of the humanist circle in which On the Nature of Things circulated. The Utopians, More wrote, are inclined to believe “that no kind of pleasure is forbidden, provided no harm comes of it.” And their behavior is not merely a matter of custom; it is a philosophical position: “They seem to lean more than they should to the school that espouses pleasure as the object by which to define either the whole or the chief part of human happiness.” That ‘school” is the school of Epicurus and Lucretius.

The setting, in the remotest part of the remotest part of the World, enabled More to convey a sense that was extremely difficult for his contemporaries to articulate: that the pagan texts recovered by the humanists were at once compellingly vital and at the same time utterly weird. They had been reinjected into the intellectual bloodstream of Europe after long centuries in which they had been almost entirely forgotten, and they represented not continuity or recovery but rather a deep disturbance. They were in effect voices from another world, a

World as diiierent as Vespucci’s Brazil was to England, and their P power derived as much from their distance as their eloquent 1 lucidity.

The invocation of the New World allowed More to articulate a second key response to the texts that fascinated the humanists. He insisted that these texts be understood not as isolated philosophical ideas but as expressions of a whole way oflife lived in particular physical, historical, cultural, and social Cir. Cumstances. The description of the Epicureanism of the Umpi. ans only made sense for More in the larger context of an entire existence.

But that existence, More thought, would have to be for everyone. He took seriously the claim, so ardently made in On the Nature of Things, that Epicurus’ philosophy would liberate all of mankind from its abject misery. Or rather, More took seriously the universality that is the underlying Greek meaning of the word “catholic.” It would not be enough for Epicureanism to enlighten a small elite in a walled garden; it would have to apply to society as a whole. Utopia is a visionary, detailed blueprint for this application, from public housing to universal health care, from child care centers to religious toleration to the six-hour work day. The point of More’s celebrated fable is to imagine those conditions that would make it possible for an entire society to make the pursuit of happiness its collective goal.

For More, those conditions would have to begin with the abolition of private property. Otherwise the avidity of human beings, their longing for “nobility, magnificence, splendor and majesty,” would inevitably lead to the unequal distribution of wealth that consigns a large portion of the population to lives t of misery, resentment, and crime. But communism was not i, enough. Certain ideas would have to be banned. Specifically, it More wrote, the Utopians impose strict punishment, including
the harshest form of slavery, on anyone who denies the existence of divine providence or of the afterlife. The denial of Providence and the denial of the afterlife were the twin pillars of Lucretius’ whole poem. Thomas More then at once imaginatively embraced Epicureanism the most sustained and intelligent embrace since Poggio recovered De rerum natura a century earlier-and carefully cut its heart out. All citizens of his Utopia are encouraged to pursue pleasure; but those who think that the soul dies with the body or who believe ‘ that chance rules the universe, More writes, are arrested and enslaved. This harsh treatment was the only way More could conceive of the pursuit of pleasure actually being realized by more than a tiny privileged group of philosophers who have withdrawn from public life. People would have to believe, at a bare minimum, that there was an overarching providential design-not only in the state but in the very structure of the universe itself-and they would have to believe as well that the norms by which they are meant to regulate their pursuit of pleasure and hence discipline their behavior were reinforced by this providential design. The way that this reinforcement would work would be . through a belief in rewards and punishments in an afterlife. Otherwise, in More’s View, it would be impossible drastically to reduce, as he wished, both the terrible punishments and the extravagant rewards that kept his own unjust society in order.

By the standards of More’s age, the Utopians are amazingly tolerant: they do not prescribe a single official religious doctrine and then apply thumbscrews to those who do not adhere to it. Their citizens are permitted to worship any god they please

i and even to share these beliefs with others, provided that they t do so in a calm and rational manner. But in Utopia there is no it tolerance at all for those who think that their souls will disintegrate at death along with their bodies or who doubt that the gods, it they exist at all, concern themselves with the doings of mankind. These people are a threat, for what will restranl them from doing anything that they please? Utopians regard such unbelievers, More wrote, as less than human and certain}). unfit to remain in the community. For no one, in their View can be counted “among their citizens whose laws and custom; he would treat as worthless if it were not for fear.”

“If it were not for fear”: fear might be eliminated in the philosopher’s garden, among a tiny, enlightened elite, but it can. not be eliminated from an entire society, if that society is to be imagined as inhabited by the range of people who actually exist in the world as it has always been known. Even with the full force of Utopian social conditioning, human nature, More believed, would inevitably lead men to resort to force or fraud in order to get whatever they desire. More’s belief was conditioned no doubt by his ardent Catholicism, but in this same period Machiavelli, who was considerably less pious than the saintly More, came to the same conclusion. Laws and customs, the author of The Prince thought, were worthless without fear.

More tried to imagine what it would take not for certain individuals to be enlightened but for a whole commonwealth to do away with cruelty and disorder, share the goods of life equitably, organize itself around the pursuit of pleasure, and tear down the gibbets. The gibbets, all but a few, could be dismantled, More concluded, if and only if people were persuaded to imagine gibbets (and rewards) in another life. Without these imaginary supplements the social order would inevitably collapse, with each individual attempting to fulfill his wishes: “Who can doubt that he will strive either to evade by craft the public laws of his country or to break them by Violence in order to serve his private desires when he has nothing to fear but laws and no hope beyond the body?” More was fully prepared to countenance the public execution of anyone who thought and taught otherwise.

More's imaginary Utopians have a practical, instrumental motive for enforcing faith in Providence and in the afterlife: they are convinced that they cannot trust anyone who does not hold these beliefs. But More himself, as a pious Chrisrian, had another motive: jesus’ own words. “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall on the ground without your Father’s will,” Jesus tells his disciples, adding that “even the hairs of your head are all numbered” (Matthew I0:29.30). There is, as Hamlet paraphrased the verse, “a speC131 providence in the fall of a sparrow.” Who in Christendom would dare to argue with that?

One answer in the sixteenth century was a diminutive Dominican monk, Giordano Bruno. In the mid-15805, the thirty-six-year-old Bruno, who had fled from his monastery in Naples and had wandered restlessly through Italy and France, found himself in London. Brilliant, reckless, at once charmingly charismatic and insufferably argumentative, he survived by cobbling together support from patrons, teaching the art of memory, and lecturing on various aspects of what he called the Nolan philosophy, named after the small town near Naples where he was born. That philosophy had several roots, tangled together in an exuberant and often baffling mix, but one of them was Epicureanism. Indeed, there are many indications that De rerum natum had unsettled and transformed Bruno’s whole world.

During his stay in England, Bruno wrote and published a hood of strange works. The extraordinary daring of these works may be gauged by taking in the implications of a single passage from one of them, The Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast, printed in 1584. Mercury, the herald of the gods, is recounting to Sofia all the things Jove has assigned him to bring about.
Divine providence, at least as popularly understood, is rubbish. The details were all deliberately trivial but the stakes were extremely high: to mock Jesus’ claim that the hairs on one’s head are all numbered risked provoking an unpleasant visit from the thought police. Religion was not a laughing matter, at least for the officials assigned to enforce orthodoxy. They did not treat even trivial jokes lightly. In France, a villager named Isambard was arrested for having exclaimed, when a friar announced after mass that he would say a few words about God, "The fewer the better." In Spain, a tailor named Garcia Lopez. coming out of church just after the priest had announced the long schedule of services for the coming week, quipped that ”When we were jews, we were bored stiff by one Passover each year, and now each day seems to be a Passover and feast~day." Garcia Lopez was denounced to the Inquisition.

But Bruno was in England. Despite the vigorous efforts that Thomas More made. during his time as chancellor, to establish one, England had no Inquisition. Though it was still quite possible to get into serious trouble for unguarded speech. Bruno may have felt more at liberty to speak his mind, or, in this case. to indulge in raucous, wildly subversive laughter. That laughter had a philosophical point: once you take seriously the claim that God's providence extends to the fall of a sparrow and the number of hairs on your head, there is virtually no limit. from the agitated dust motes in a beam of sunlight to the planetary conjunctions that are occurring in the heavens above. “0 Mercury." Sofia says pityingly. “You have a lot to do.”

Sofia grasps that it would take billions of tongues to describe all that must happen even in a single moment in a tiny village in the Campagna. At this rate, no one could envy poor jove. But then Mercury admits that the whole thing does not work that way: there is no artificer god standing outside the universe barking commands. meting out rewards and punishments, determining everything. The whole idea is absurd. There is an order in the universe, but it is one built into the nature of things, into the matter that composes everything, from stars to men to bedbugs. Nature is not an abstract capacity, but a generative mother, bringing forth everything that exists. We have, in other words, entered the Lucretian universe.

That universe was not for Bruno a place of melancholy disenchantment. On the contrary, he found it thrilling to realize that the world has no limits in either space or time, that the grandest things are made of the smallest, that atoms, the building blocks of all that exists, link the one and the infinite. “The world is fine as it is,” he wrote, sweeping away as if they were so many cobwebs innumerable sermons on anguish, guilt, and repentance. It was pointless to search for divinity in the bruised and battered body of the Son and pointless to dream of finding the Father in some far-off heaven. "We have the knowledge,” he wrote, “not to search for divinity removed from us if we have it near; it is within us more than we ourselves are.” And his philosophical cheerfulness extended to his everyday life. He was, a Florentine contemporary observed, “a delightful companion at the table, much given to the Epicurean life.”

Like Lucretius, Bruno warned against focusing all of one’s capacity for love and longing on a single object of obsessive desire. It was perfectly good, he thought, to satisfy the body’s sexual cravings, but absurd to confuse those cravings with the search for ultimate truths, the truths that only philosophy-the Nolan philosophy, of course-could provide. It is not that those truths were abstract and bodiless. On the contrary, Bruno might have been the first person in more than a millennium to grasp the full force, at once philosophical and erotic, of Lucretius’ hymn to Venus. The universe, in its ceaseless process of generation and destruction and regeneration, is inherently sexual. Bruno found the militant Protestantism he encountered in England and elsewhere as bigoted and narrow-minded as the Counter-Reformation Catholicism from which he had fled The whole phenomenon of sectarian hatred tilled him With contempt. What he prized was the courage to stand up for the truth against the belligerent idiots who were always prepared to shout down what they could not understand. That courage he found preeminently in the astronomer Copernicus, who was, as he put it, “ordained by the gods to be the dawn which must precede the rising of the sun of the ancient and true philosophy, for so many centuries entombed in the dark caverns of blind, spiteful, arrogant, and envious ignorance.”

Copernicus’s assertion that the earth was not the fixed point at the center of the universe but a planet in orbit around the sun was still, when Bruno championed it, a scandalous idea, anathema both to the Church and to the academic establishment. And Bruno managed to push the scandal of Copernicanism still further: there was no center to the universe at all, he argued, neither earth nor sun. Instead, he wrote, quoting Lucretius, there were multiple worlds, where the seeds of things, in their infinite numbers, would certainly combine to form other races of men, other creatures. Each of the fixed stars observed in the sky is a sun, scattered through limitless space. Many of these are accompanied by satellites that revolve around them as the earth revolves around our sun. The universe is not all about us, about our behavior and our destiny; we are only a tiny piece of something inconceivably larger. And that should not make us shrink in fear. Rather, we should embrace the world in wonder and gratitude and awe.

These were extremely dangerous views, every one of them, and it did not improve matters when Bruno, pressed to reconcile his cosmology with Scripture, wrote that the Bible was a better guide to morality than to charting the heavens. Many people may have quietly agreed, but it was not prudent to say so in public, let alone in print.

Bruno was hardly the only brilliant scientific mind at work in Europe, rethinking the nature of things: in London he would almost certainly have met Thomas Harriot, who constructed the largest telescope in England, observed sun spots, sketched the lunar surface, observed the satellites of planets, Proposed that planets moved not in perfect circles but in elliptical orbits, worked on mathematical cartography, discovered the sine law of refraction, and achieved major breakthroughs in algebra. Many of these discoveries anticipated ones for which Galileo, Descartes, and others became famous. But Harriot is not credited with any of them: they were found only recently in the mass of unpublished papers he left at his death. Among those papers was a careful list that Harriot, an atomist, kept of the attacks upon him as a purported atheist. He knew that the attacks would only intensify if he published any of his findings, and he preferred life to fame. Who can blame him?

Bruno, however, could not remain silent. “By the light of his senses and reason,” he wrote about himself, “he opened those Cloisters of truth which it is possible for us to open with the key of most diligent inquiry, he laid bare covered and veiled nature, gave eyes to the moles and light to the blind . . . he loosed the tongues of the dumb who could not and dared not express their entangled Opinions.” As a child, he recalled in On the Immense and the Numberless, a Latin poem modeled on Lucretius, he had believed that there was nothing beyond Vesuvius, since his eye could not see beyond the volcano. Now he knew that he was part of an infinite world, and he could not enclose himself once again in the narrow mental cell his culture insisted that he inhabit.

More Swerving

Lucretius:
One simple name for the plague that Lucretius brought-«a charge frequently leveled against him, when his poem began once again to be read-is atheism. But Lucretius was not in fact an atheist. He believed that the gods existed. But he also believed that, by virtue of being gods, they could not possibly be concerned with human beings or with anything that we do. Divinity by its very nature, he thought, must enjoy eternal life and peace entirely untouched by any suffering or disturbance and indifferent to human actions.

If it gives you pleasure to call the sea Neptune or to refer to grain and wine as Ceres and Bacchus, Lucretius wrote, you should feel free to do so, just as you can dub the round world the Mother of the Gods. And if, drawn by their solemn beauty, you choose to visit religious shrines, you will be doing yourself no harm, provided that you contemplate the images of the gods “in peace and tranquillity.” (6:78) But you should not think for a minute that you can either anger or propitiate any of these deities. The processions, the animal sacrifices, the frenzied dances, the drums and cymbals and pipes, the showers of snowy rose petals, the eunuch priests, the carved images of the infant god: all of these cultic practices, though compelling and impressive in their way, are fundamentally meaningless, since the gods they are meant to reach are entirely removed and separated from our world.

It is possible to argue that, despite his profession of religious belief, Lucretius was some sort of atheist, a particularly sly one perhaps, since to almost all believers of almost all religious faiths in almost all times it has seemed pointless to worship a god without the hope of appeasing divine wrath or acquiring divine protection and favor. What is the use of a god who is uninterested in punishing or rewarding? Lucretius insisted that such hopes and anxieties are precisely a toxic form of superstition, combining in equal measure absurd arrogance and absurd fear. Imagining that the gods actually care about the fate of humans or about their ritual practices is, he observed, a particularly vulgar insult-as if divine beings depended for their happiness on our mumbled words or good behavior. But that insult is the least of the problems, since the gods quite literally could not care less. Nothing that we can do (or not do) could possibly interest them. The serious issue is that false beliefs and Observances inevitably lead to human mischief.

These views were certainly contrary to Poggio’s own Christian faith and would have led any contemporary who espoused them into the most serious trouble. But by themselves, encountered in a pagan text, they were not likely to trigger great alarm, Poggio could have told himself, as did some later sympathetic readers of On the Nature of Things, that the brilliant ancient poet simply intuited the emptiness of pagan beliefs and hence the absurdity of sacrifices to gods who did not in fact exist. Lucretius, after all, had the misfortune of living shortly before the coming of the Messiah. Had he been born a century later, he would have had the opportunity of learning the truth. As it was, he at least grasped that the practices of his own contemporaries were worthless. Hence even many modern translations of Lucretius’ poem into English reassuringly have it denounce as “superstition” what the Latin text calls simply religio.

But atheism-or, more accurately, the indifference of the gods-was not the only problem posed by Lucretius’ poem. Its main concerns lay elsewhere, in the material world we all inhabit, and it is here that the most disturbing arguments arose, arguments that lured those who were most struck by their formidable power-Machiavelli, Bruno, Galileo, and others-into strange trains of thought. Those trains of thought had once been eagerly explored in the very land to which they now returned, as a result of Poggio’s discovery. But a thousand years of virtual silence had rendered them highly dangerous.

By now much of what On the Nature of Things claims about the universe seems deeply familiar, at least among the circle of people who are likely to be reading these words. After all, many of the work’s core arguments are among the foundations on which modern life has been constructed. But it is worth remembering that some of the arguments remain alien and that others are hotly contested, often by those who gladly avail themselves of the scientific advances they helped to spawn. And to all but a few of Poggio’s contemporaries, most of what Lucretius claimed, albeit in a poem of startling, seductive beauty, seemed incomprehensible, unbelievable, or impious.

Here is a brief list, by no means exhaustive, of the elements that constituted the Lucretian challenge:

Everything is made of invisible particles. Lucretius, who disliked technical language, chose not to use the standard Greek philosophical term for these foundational particles, “atoms,” i.e., things that cannot be divided. He deployed instead a variety of ordinary Latin words: “first things,” “first beginnings,” “the bodies of matter,” “the seeds of things.” Everything is formed of these seeds and, on dissolution, returns to them in the end. Immutable, indivisible, invisible, and infinite in number, they are constantly in motion, clashing with one another, coming together to form new shapes, coming apart, recombining again, enduring.
The elementary particles of matter "the seeds of the things” are eternal. Time is not limited: a discrete substance with a beginning and an end but infinite. The invisible particles from which the entire universe is made, from the stars to the lowliest insect, are indestructible and immortal, though any particular object in the universe is transitory. That is, all the forms that we observe, even those that seem the most durable, are temporary: the building blocks from which they are composed will sooner or later be redistributed. But those building blocks themselves are permanent, as is the ceaseless process of formation, dissolution, and redistribution.

Neither creation nor destruction ever has the upperhand, the sum total of matter remains the same, and the balance between the living and the dead is always restored:

And so the destructive motions cannot hold sway eternally and bury existence forever; nor again can the motions that cause life and growth preserve created things eternally. Thus, in this war that has been waged from time everlasting, the contest between the elements is an equal one: now here, now there, the vital forces conquer and, in turn, are conquered; with the funeral dirge mingles the wail that babies raise when they reach the shores of light; no night has followed day, and no dawn has followed night, which has not heard mingled with those woeful wails the lamentations that accompany death and the black funeral. (2569-80)

The Spanish-born Harvard philosopher George Santayana called this idea-the ceaseless mutation of forms composed of indestructible substances-“the greatest thought that mankind has ever hit upon.”

The elementary particles are infinite in number but limited in shape and size. They are like the letters in an alphabet, a discrete set capable of being combined in an infinite number of sentences. (2.6883,) And, with the seeds of things as with language, the combinations are made according to a code. As not all letters or all words can be coherently combined, so too not all particles can combine with all other particles in every possible manner. Some of the seeds of things routinely and easily hook onto others; some repel and resist one another. Lucretius did not claim to know the hidden code of matter. But, he argued, it is important to grasp that there is a code and that, in principle, it could be investigated and understood by human science.

All particles are in motion in an infinite void. Space, like time, is unbounded. There are no fixed points, no beginnings, middles, or ends, and no limits. Matter is not packed together in a solid mass. There is a void in things, allowing the constitutive particles to move, collide, combine, and move apart. Evidence for the void includes not only the restless motion that we observe all around us, but also such phenomena as water oozing through the walls of caves, food dispersed through bodies, sound passing through walls of closed rooms, cold permeating to the bones.

The universe consists then of matter-the primary particles and all that those particles come together to form-and space, intangible and empty. Nothing else exists.

The universe has no creator or designer. The particles themselves have not been made and cannot be destroyed. The patterns of order and disorder in the world are not the product of any divine scheme. Providence is a fantasy.

What exists is not the manifestation of any overarching plan or any intelligent design inherent in matter itself. No supreme choreographer planned their movements and the seeds of things did not have a meeting in which they decided what would go where.

But because throughout the universe from time everlasting countless numbers of them, buffeted and impelled by blows, have shifted in countless ways, experimentation with every kind of movement and combination has at last resulted in arrangements such as those that created and compose our world. (11024-28) There is no end or purpose to existence, only ceaseless creation and destruction, governed entirely by chance. Everything comes into being as a result of a swerve. If all the individual particles, in their infinite numbers, fell through the void in straight lines, pulled down by their own weight like raindrops, nothing would ever exist. But the particles do not move lockstep in a preordained single direction. Instead, “at absolutely unpredictable times and places they deflect slightly from their straight course, to a degree that could be described as no more than a shift of movement.” (2218-20) The position of the elementary particles is thus indeterminate.

The swerve-Which Lucretius called variously declinatio, inclinatio, or clinamen~is only the most minimal of motions, nec plus quam minimum. (2.244) But it is enough to set off a ceaseless chain of collisions. Whatever exists in the universe exists because of these random collisions of minute particles. The endless combinations and recombinations, resulting from the collisions over a limitless span of time, bring it about that “the rivers replenish the insatiable sea with plentiful streams of water, that the earth, warmed by the sun’s fostering heat, renews her produce, that the family of animals springs up and thrives, and that the gliding ethereal fires have life.” (1.1031 34)

The swerve is the source of free will. In the lives of all sentient creatures, human and animal alike, the random swerve of elementary particles is responsible for the existence of free will. For if all of motion were one long predetermined chain, there would be no possibility of freedom. Cause would follow cause from eternity, as the fates decreed. Instead, we wrest free will from the fates.

But what is the evidence that the will exists? Why should we not simply think that the matter in living creatures moves because of the same blows that propel dust motes? Lucretius’ image is the split second on the race track after the starting gate is opened, before the straining horses, frantically eager to move, can actually propel their bodies forward. That split second is the thrilling spectacle of a mental act bidding a mass of matter into motion. And because this image did not quite answer to his whole purpose-because, after all, race horses are precisely creatures driven to move by the blows of their riders-Lucretius went on to observe that though an outside force may strike against a man, that man may deliberately hold himself back.

Nature ceaselessly experiments. There is no single moment of origin, no mythic scene of creation. All living beings, from plants and insects to the higher mammals and man, have evolved through a long, complex process of trial and error. The process involves many false starts and dead ends, monsters, prodigies, mistakes, creatures that were not endowed with all the features that they needed to compete for resources and to create offspring. Creatures whose combination of organs enables them to adapt and to reproduce will succeed in establishing themselves, until changing circumstnces make it impossible for them any longer to survive.

The successful adaptations, like the failures. are the result of a fantastic number of combinations that are constantly being generated (and reproduced or discarded) over an unlimited expanse of time. it is difficult to grasp this point, Lucretius acknowledged, but "what has been created gives rise to its own function.” (4.835) That is, he explained, "Sight did not exist before the birth of the eyes, nor speech before the creation of the tongue.” (4.836-37) These organs were not created in order to fulfill a purposed end; their usefulness gradually enabled the creatures in whom they emerged to survive and to reproduce their kind. The universe was not created for or about humans. The earth-with its seas and deserts, harsh climate, wild beasts, diseases-was obviously not purpose-built to make our species feel at home. Unlike many other animals, who are endowed at birth with what they need to survive, human infants are almost completely vulnerable: Consider, Lucretius wrote in a celebrated passage, how a baby, like a ship Wrecked sailor flung ashore by fierce waves, lies on the ground naked, speechless, and utterly helpless as soon as nature has cast it forth with pangs of labor from its mother’s womb into the shores of light. (5223-25)

The fate of the entire species (let alone that of any individual) is not the pole around which everything revolves. Indeed, there is no reason to believe that human beings as a species will last forever. On the contrary, it is clear that, over the infinite expanses of time, some species grow, others disappear, generated and destroyed in the ceaseless process of change. There were other forms of life before us which no longer exist; there will be other forms of life after us, when our kind has vanished.

Humans are not unique. They are part of a much larger material process that links them not only to all other life forms but to inorganic matter as well. The invisible particles out of which living things, including humans, are composed are not sentient nor do they come from some mysterious source. We are made of the same stuff that everything else is made of.

Humans do not occupy the privileged place in existence. They imagine for themselves: though they often fail to recognize the fact, they share many of their most cherished qualities with other animals. To be sure, each individual is unique, but, thanks to the abundance of matter, the same is true of virtually all creatures: how else do we imagine that a calf recognizes its dam or the cow her calf? We have only to look attentively at the world around us to grasp that many of the most intense and poignant experiences of our lives are not exclusive to our species. Human society began not in a Golden Age of tranquility and plenty, but in a primitive battle for survival. There was no original paradisal time of plenty, as some have dreamed, in which happy, peaceful men and women, living in security and leisure, enjoyed the fruits of nature’s abundance. Early humans, lacking lire, agriculture, and other means to soften a brutally hard existence, struggled to eat and to avoid being eaten.

There may always have been some rudimentary capacity for social cooperation in the interest of survival, but the ability to form bonds and to live in communities governed by settled customs developed slowly. At first there was only random mating-~either from mutual desire or from barter or rape-«and the hunting and gathering of food. Mortality rates were extremely high, though not, Lucretius noted wryly, as high as they currently are, inflated by warfare, shipwreck, and overeating.

The idea that language was somehow given to humans, as a miraculous invention, is absurd. Instead, Lucretius wrote, humans, who like other animals used inarticulate cries and gestures in various situations, slowly arrived at shared sounds to designate the same things. So too, long before they were able to join together to sing melodious songs, humans imitated the warbling of birds and the sweet sound of a gentle breeze in the reeds and so gradually developed a capacity to make music.

The arts of civilization-not given to man by some divine lawmaker but painstakingly fashioned by the shared talents and mental power of the species-are accomplishments worth celebrating, but they are not unmixed blessings. They arose in tandem with the fear of the gods, the desire for wealth, the pursuit of fame and power. All of these originated in a craving for security, a craving that reaches back to the earliest experiences of the human species struggling to master its natural enemies. That violent struggle-against the wild beasts that threatened human survival-was largely successful, but the anxious, acquisitive, aggressive impulses have metastasized. In consequence, human beings characteristically develop weapons that turn against themselves.

The soul dies. The human soul is made of the same material as the human body. The fact that we cannot physically locate the soul in a particular organ only means that it is made of exceedingly minute particles interlaced through the veins, flesh, and sinews. Our instruments are not line enough to weigh the soul: at the moment of death, it dissolves “like the case of a wine Whose bouquet has evaporated, or a perfume whose exquisite scent has dispersed into the air.” (3.221-2) We do not imagine that the wine or perfume contains a mysterious soul; only that the scent consists of very subtle material elements, too small to measure. So too of the human spirit: it consists of tiny elements hidden in body’s most secret recesses. When the body dies-that is, when its matter is dispersed-~the soul, which is part of the body, dies as well.

There is no afterlife. Humans have both consoled and tormented themselves with the thought that something awaits them after they have died. Either they will gather flowers for eternity in a paradisal garden where no chill wind ever blows or they will be frog-marched before a harsh judge who will condemn them, for their sins, to unending misery (misery that somewhat mysteriously requires them after dying to have heat-sensitive skin, an aversion to cold, bodily appetite and thirst, and the like). But once you grasp that your soul dies along with your body, you also grasp that there can be no posthumous punishments or rewards. Life on this earth is all that human beings have.

Death is nothing to us. When you are dead-when the particles that have been linked together, to create and sustain you, have come apart-there will be neither pleasure nor pain, longing nor fear. Mourners, Lucretius wrote, always wring their hands in anguish and say, “Never again will your dear children race for the prize of your first kisses and touch your heart with pleasure too profound for words.” (3.895-98) But they do not go on to add, “You will not care, because you will not exist.”

All organized religions are superstitious delusions. The delusions are based on deeply rooted longings, fears, and ignorance. Humans project images of the power and beauty and perfect security that they would like to possess.

Fashioning their gods accordingly, they become enslaved to their own dreams.

Everyone is subject to the feelings that generate such dreams: they wash over you when you look up at the stars and start imagining beings of immeasurable power; or when you wonder if the universe has any limits; or when you marvel at the exquisite order of things; or, less agree ably, when you experience an uncanny string of misf0r~ tunes and wonder if you are being punished; or when nature shows its destructive side. There are entirely natural explanations for such phenomena as lightning and earthquakes-Lucretius spells them out-but terrified humans instinctively respond with religious fear and start praying.

Religions are invariably cruel. Religions always promise hope and love, but their deep, underlying structure is cruelty. This is why they are drawn to fantasies of retribution and why they inevitably stir up anxiety among their adherents. The quintessential emblem of religion-and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core-is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.

Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphegenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around so BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.

There are no angels, demons, or ghosts. Immaterial spirits or any kind do not exist. The creatures with which the Greek and Roman imagination populated the world- Fates, harpies, daemons, genii, nymphs, satyrs, dryads, celestial messengers, and the spirits of the dead- are entirely unreal. Forget them.

The highest goal of human life is the enhancement of pleasure and the reduction of pain. Life should be organized to serve the pursuit of happiness. There is no ethical purpose higher than facilitating this pursuit for oneself and one’s fellow creatures. All the other claims-the service of the state, the glorification of the gods or the ruler, the arduous pursuit of virtue through self-sacrifice-are secondary, misguided, or fraudulent. The militarism and the taste for violent sports that characterized his own culture seemed to Lucretius in the deepest sense perverse and unnatural. Man’s natural needs are simple. A failure to recognize the boundaries of these needs leads human beings to a vain and fruitless struggle for more and more.

Most people grasp rationally that the luxuries they crave are, for the most part, pointless and do little or nothing to enhance their well-being: ”Fiery fevers quit your body no quicker, if you toss in embroidered attire of blushing crimson, than if you must lie sick in a common garment.” (234-36) But, as it is difficult to resist fears of the gods and the afterlife, so too it is difficult to resist the compulsive sense that security, for oneself and one’s community, can somehow be enhanced through exploits of passionate acquisitiveness and conquest. These exploits, however, only decrease the possibility of happiness and put everyone engaged in them at the risk of shipwreck.

The goal, Lucretius wrote in a celebrated and famously disturbing passage, must be to escape from the whole mad enterprise and observe it from a position of safetv:
It is comforting when winds are whipping up the waters of the vast sea. to watch from land the severe trials of another person: not that anyone’s distress is a cause of agreeable pleasure; but it is comforting to see from what troubles you yourself are exempt. It is comforting also to witness mighty clashes of warriors embattled on the plains, when you have no share in the danger. But nothing is more bliss ful than to occupy the heights effectively fortified by the teaching of the wise, tranquil sanctuaries from which you can look down upon others and see them wandering everywhere in their random search for the way oflife, competing for intellectual eminence, disputing about rank, and striving night and day with prodigious effort to scale the summit of wealth and to secure power. (2:1-13)

The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion. The principal enemies of human happiness are inordinate desire-the fantasy of attaining something that exceeds what the finite mortal world allows-and gnawing fear. Even the dreaded plague, in Lucretius’ account-and his work ends with a graphic account of a catastrophic plague epidemic in Athens---is most horrible not only for the suffering and death that it brings but also and still more for the “perturbation and panic” that it triggers.

It is perfectly reasonable to seek to avoid pain: such avoidance is one ofthe pillars of his whole ethical system. But how is it possible to keep this natural aversion from turning into panic, panic that only leads to the triumph of suil'ering? And, more generally, why are humans so unhappy?

The answer, Lucretius thought, had to do with the power of the imagination. Though they are finite and

mortal, humans are gripped by illusions of the infinite-infinite pleasure and infinite pain. The fantasy ofinfmite pain helps to account for their proneness to religion: in the misguided belief that their souls are immortal and hence potentially subject to an eternity of suffering, humans imagine that they can somehow negotiate with the gods for a better outcome, an eternity of pleasure in paradise. The fantasy ofinhnite pleasure helps to account for their pronencss to romantic love: in the misguided belief that their happiness depends upon the absolute possession of some single object of limitless desire, humans are seized by a feverish, unappeasable hunger and thirst that can only bring anguish instead of happiness.

Once again it is perfectly reasonable to seek sexual pleasure: that is, after all, one of the body’s natural joys. The mistake, Lucretius thought, was to confound this joy with a delusion, the frenzied craving to possess-at once to penetrate and to consume-what is in reality a dream. Of course, the absent lover is always only a mental image and in this sense akin to a dream. But Lucretius observed in passages of remarkable frankness that in the very act of sexual consummation lovers remain in the grip of confused longings that they cannot fulfill:

Even in the hour of possession the passion of the lovers fluctuates and wanders in uncertainty: they cannot decide what to enjoy first with their eyes and hands. They tightly squeeze the object of their desire and cause bodily pain, often driving their teeth into one another's lips and crushing mouth against mouth. (41076-81)

The point of this passage-part of what W. B. Yeats called the finest description of sexual intercourse ever written - is not to urge a more decorous. tepid form of lovemaking

It is to take note of the element or unsated appetite that haunts even the fulfillment of desire_ The insatiability of sexual appetite is, in Lucretius’ view, one of Venus’ cunning strategies; it helps to account for the fact that after brief interludes, the same acts of love are performed again and again. And he understood too that these repeated acts are deeply pleasurable. But he remained troubled by the ruse, by the emotional suffering that comes in its wake by the arousal of aggressive impulses, and, above all by the sense that even the moment of ecstasy leaves something to be desired. In 1685, the great poet John Dryden brilliantly captured Lucretius’ remarkable vision;

. . . when the youthful pair more closely join, When hands in hands they lock, and thighs in thighs they twine; Just in the raging foam of full desire, When both press on, both murmur, both expire, They grip, they squeeze, their humid tongues they dart, As each would force their way to th’others heart, In vain; they only cruise about the coast. For bodies cannot pierce, nor be in bodies lost, As sure they strive to be, when both engage In that tumultuous momentary rage. So tangled in the nets of love they lie, Till man dissolves in that excess of joy.

Understanding the nature of things generates deep wonder. The realization that the universe consists of atoms and void and nothing else, that the world was not made for us by a providential creator, that we are not the center of the universe, that our emotional lives are no more distinct than our physical lives from those of all other creatures, that our souls are as material and as mortal as our bodies-all these things are not the cause for despair. On the contrary, grasping the way things really are is the crucial step toward the possibility of happiness. Human insignificance-the fact that it is not all about us and our fate-~is, Lucretius insisted, the good news.

It is possible for human beings to live happy lives, but not because they think that they are the center of the universe or because they fear the gods or because they nobly sacrifice themselves for values that purport to transcend their mortal existence. Unappeasable desire and the fear of death are the principal obstacles to human happiness, but the obstacles can be surmounted through the exercise of reason.

The exercise of reason is not available only to specialists; it is accessible to everyone. What is needed is to refuse the lies proffered by priests and other fantasymongers and to look squarely and calmly at the true nature of things. All speculation-all science, all morality, all attempts to fashion a life worth living-must start and end with a comprehension of the invisible seeds of things: atoms and the void and nothing else.

It might seem at first that this comprehension would inevitably bring with it a sense of cold emptiness, as if the universe had been robbed of its magic. But being liberated from harmful illusions is not the same as disillusionment. The origin of philosophy, it was often said in the ancient world, was wonder: surprise and bafflement led to a desire to know, and knowledge in turn laid the wonder to rest. But in Lucretius’ account the process is something like the reverse: it is knowing the way things are that awakens the deepest wonder.

Middlemarch Book One

From Chapter 1

She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the

addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless,

Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close

observers that her dress differed from her sister's, and had a shade

of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing

was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared.

The pride of being ladies had something to do with it: the Brooke

connections, though not exactly aristocratic, were unquestionably

"good:" if you inquired backward for a generation or two, you would

not find any yard-measuring or parcel-tying forefathers--anything

lower than an admiral or a clergyman; and there was even an ancestor

discernible as a Puritan gentleman who served under Cromwell,

but afterwards conformed, and managed to come out of all political

troubles as the proprietor of a respectable family estate.

Young women of such birth, living in a quiet country-house,

and attending a village church hardly larger than a parlor,

naturally regarded frippery as the ambition of a huckster's daughter.

Then there was well-bred economy, which in those days made show in

dress the first item to be deducted from, when any margin was required

for expenses more distinctive of rank. Such reasons would have been

enough to account for plain dress, quite apart from religious feeling;

but in Miss Brooke's case, religion alone would have determined it;

and Celia mildly acquiesced in all her sister's sentiments,

only infusing them with that common-sense which is able to accept

momentous doctrines without any eccentric agitation. Dorothea knew

many passages of Pascal's Pensees and of Jeremy Taylor by heart;

and to her the destinies of mankind, seen by the light of Christianity,

made the solicitudes of feminine fashion appear an occupation

for Bedlam. She could not reconcile the anxieties of a spiritual

life involving eternal consequences, with a keen interest in gimp

and artificial protrusions of drapery. Her mind was theoretic,

and yearned by its nature after some lofty conception of the world

which might frankly include the parish of Tipton and her own rule

of conduct there; she was enamoured of intensity and greatness,

and rash in embracing whatever seemed to her to have those aspects;

likely to seek martyrdom, to make retractations, and then to incur

martyrdom after all in a quarter where she had not sought it.

and

It was hardly a year since they had come to live at Tipton Grange

with their uncle, a man nearly sixty, of acquiescent temper,

miscellaneous opinions, and uncertain vote. He had travelled

in his younger years, and was held in this part of the county

to have contracted a too rambling habit of mind. Mr. Brooke's

conclusions were as difficult to predict as the weather: it was

only safe to say that he would act with benevolent intentions,

and that he would spend as little money as possible in carrying

them out. For the most glutinously indefinite minds enclose some

hard grains of habit; and a man has been seen lax about all his

own interests except the retention of his snuff-box, concerning

which he was watchful, suspicious, and greedy of clutch.

In Mr. Brooke the hereditary strain of Puritan energy was clearly

in abeyance; but in his niece Dorothea it glowed alike through faults

and virtues, turning sometimes into impatience of her uncle's talk

or his way of "letting things be" on his estate, and making her long

all the more for the time when she would be of age and have some

command of money for generous schemes.

and

And how should Dorothea not marry?--a girl so handsome and with

such prospects? Nothing could hinder it but her love of extremes,

and her insistence on regulating life according to notions which

might cause a wary man to hesitate before he made her an offer,

or even might lead her at last to refuse all offers. A young lady

of some birth and fortune, who knelt suddenly down on a brick floor

by the side of a sick laborer and prayed fervidly as if she thought

herself living in the time of the Apostles--who had strange whims

of fasting like a Papist, and of sitting up at night to read old

theological books! Such a wife might awaken you some fine morning with

a new scheme for the application of her income which would interfere

with political economy and the keeping of saddle-horses: a man would

naturally think twice before he risked himself in such fellowship.

Women were expected to have weak opinions; but the great safeguard

of society and of domestic life was, that opinions were not acted on.

Sane people did what their neighbors did, so that if any lunatics

were at large, one might know and avoid them.

The rural opinion about the new young ladies, even among the cottagers,

was generally in favor of Celia, as being so amiable and innocent-looking,

while Miss Brooke's large eyes seemed, like her religion, too unusual

and striking. Poor Dorothea! compared with her, the innocent-looking

Celia was knowing and worldly-wise; so much subtler is a human mind

than the outside tissues which make a sort of blazonry or clock-face

for it.

Yet those who approached Dorothea, though prejudiced against her

by this alarming hearsay, found that she had a charm unaccountably

reconcilable with it.  Most men thought her bewitching when she

was on horseback. She loved the fresh air and the various aspects

of the country, and when her eyes and cheeks glowed with mingled

pleasure she looked very little like a devotee. Riding was an

indulgence which she allowed herself in spite of conscientious qualms;

she felt that she enjoyed it in a pagan sensuous way, and always

looked forward to renouncing it.

and

"Not for the world, not for the world. A cross is the last thing

I would wear as a trinket." Dorothea shuddered slightly.

"Then you will think it wicked in me to wear it," said Celia, uneasily.

"No, dear, no," said Dorothea, stroking her sister's cheek.

"Souls have complexions too: what will suit one will not suit another."

"But you might like to keep it for mamma's sake."

"No, I have other things of mamma's--her sandal-wood box which I am

so fond of--plenty of things. In fact, they are all yours, dear.

We need discuss them no longer. There--take away your property."

Celia felt a little hurt. There was a strong assumption of superiority

in this Puritanic toleration, hardly less trying to the blond

flesh of an unenthusiastic sister than a Puritanic persecution.

"But how can I wear ornaments if you, who are the elder sister,

will never wear them?"

"Nay, Celia, that is too much to ask, that I should wear trinkets

to keep you in countenance. If I were to put on such a necklace

as that, I should feel as if I had been pirouetting. The world

would go round with me, and I should not know how to walk."

Celia had unclasped the necklace and drawn it off. "It would be

a little tight for your neck; something to lie down and hang would

suit you better," she said, with some satisfaction. The complete

unfitness of the necklace from all points of view for Dorothea,

made Celia happier in taking it. She was opening some ring-boxes,

which disclosed a fine emerald with diamonds, and just then the sun

passing beyond a cloud sent a bright gleam over the table.

"How very beautiful these gems are!" said Dorothea, under a new current

of feeling, as sudden as the gleam. "It is strange how deeply colors

seem to penetrate one, like scent. I suppose that is the reason why

gems are used as spiritual emblems in the Revelation of St. John.

They look like fragments of heaven. I think that emerald is more

beautiful than any of them."

From Chapter 2

A great mistake, Chettam," interposed Mr. Brooke, "going into

electrifying your land and that kind of thing, and making a parlor

of your cow-house. It won't do. I went into science a great deal

myself at one time; but I saw it would not do. It leads to everything;

you can let nothing alone. No, no--see that your tenants don't sell

their straw, and that kind of thing; and give them draining-tiles,

you know. But your fancy farming will not do--the most expensive

sort of whistle you can buy: you may as well keep a pack of hounds."

...

"Young ladies don't understand political economy, you know,"

said Mr. Brooke, smiling towards Mr. Casaubon. "I remember when we

were all reading Adam Smith. _There_ is a book, now. I took in all

the new ideas at one time--human perfectibility, now. But some say,

history moves in circles; and that may be very well argued; I have

argued it myself. The fact is, human reason may carry you a little

too far--over the hedge, in fact. It carried me a good way at one time;

but I saw it would not do. I pulled up; I pulled up in time.

But not too hard. I have always been in favor of a little theory: we

must have Thought; else we shall be landed back in the dark ages.

.....

"But you are fond of riding, Miss Brooke," Sir James presently took

an opportunity of saying. "I should have thought you would enter

a little into the pleasures of hunting. I wish you would let me

send over a chestnut horse for you to try. It has been trained

for a lady. I saw you on Saturday cantering over the hill on a nag

not worthy of you. My groom shall bring Corydon for you every day,

if you will only mention the time."

"Thank you, you are very good. I mean to give up riding.

I shall not ride any more," said Dorothea, urged to this brusque

resolution by a little annoyance that Sir James would be soliciting

her attention when she wanted to give it all to Mr. Casaubon.

"No, that is too hard," said Sir James, in a tone of reproach that

showed strong interest. "Your sister is given to self-mortification,

is she not?" he continued, turning to Celia, who sat at his right hand.

"I think she is," said Celia, feeling afraid lest she should say

something that would not please her sister, and blushing as prettily

as possible above her necklace. "She likes giving up."

and

Miss Brooke was clearly forgetting herself, and Celia thought so.

"I wonder you show temper, Dorothea."

"It is so painful in you, Celia, that you will look at human

beings as if they were merely animals with a toilet, and never

see the great soul in a man's face."

"Has Mr. Casaubon a great soul?" Celia was not without a touch

of naive malice.

"Yes, I believe he has," said Dorothea, with the full voice

of decision. "Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet

on Biblical Cosmology."

"He talks very little," said Celia

"There is no one for him to talk to."

Celia thought privately, "Dorothea quite despises Sir James Chettam;

I believe she would not accept him." Celia felt that this was a pity.

She had never been deceived as to the object of the baronet's interest.

Sometimes, indeed, she had reflected that Dodo would perhaps not

make a husband happy who had not her way of looking at things;

and stifled in the depths of her heart was the feeling that her sister

was too religious for family comfort. Notions and scruples were

like spilt needles, making one afraid of treading, or sitting down,

or even eating.

....

Dorothea colored with pleasure, and looked up gratefully to the speaker.

Here was a man who could understand the higher inward life,

and with whom there could be some spiritual communion; nay, who could

illuminate principle with the widest knowledge a man whose learning

almost amounted to a proof of whatever he believed!

Dorothea's inferences may seem large; but really life could never have

gone on at any period but for this liberal allowance of conclusions,

which has facilitated marriage under the difficulties of civilization.

Has any one ever pinched into its pilulous smallness the cobweb

of pre-matrimonial acquaintanceship?

"Certainly," said good Sir James. "Miss Brooke shall not be urged

to tell reasons she would rather be silent upon. I am sure her

reasons would do her honor."

He was not in the least jealous of the interest with which Dorothea

had looked up at Mr. Casaubon: it never occurred to him that a girl

to whom he was meditating an offer of marriage could care for a dried

bookworm towards fifty, except, indeed, in a religious sort of way,

as for a clergyman of some distinction.

Chapter 3

Dorothea by this time had looked deep into the ungauged reservoir

of Mr. Casaubon's mind, seeing reflected there in vague labyrinthine

extension every quality she herself brought; had opened much of

her own experience to him, and had understood from him the scope

of his great work, also of attractively labyrinthine extent.

For he had been as instructive as Milton's "affable archangel;"

and with something of the archangelic manner he told her how he had

undertaken to show (what indeed had been attempted before, but not

with that thoroughness, justice of comparison, and effectiveness

of arrangement at which Mr. Casaubon aimed) that all the mythical

systems or erratic mythical fragments in the world were corruptions

of a tradition originally revealed. Having once mastered the true

position and taken a firm footing there, the vast field of mythical

constructions became intelligible, nay, luminous with the reflected

light of correspondences. But to gather in this great harvest

of truth was no light or speedy work. His notes already made

a formidable range of volumes, but the crowning task would be to

condense these voluminous still-accumulating results and bring them,

like the earlier vintage of Hippocratic books, to fit a little shelf.

Miss Brooke argued from words and dispositions not less unhesitatingly

than other young ladies of her age. Signs are small measurable things,

but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet,

ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief,

vast as a sky, and colored by a diffused thimbleful of matter in

the shape of knowledge. They are not always too grossly deceived;

for Sinbad himself may have fallen by good-luck on a true description,

and wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions:

starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops

and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

Because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore

clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.

and

She walked briskly in the brisk air, the color rose in her cheeks,

and her straw bonnet (which our contemporaries might look at

with conjectural curiosity as at an obsolete form of basket)

fell a little backward. She would perhaps be hardly characterized

enough if it were omitted that she wore her brown hair flatly braided

and coiled behind so as to expose the outline of her head in a

daring manner at a time when public feeling required the meagreness

of nature to be dissimulated by tall barricades of frizzed curls

and bows, never surpassed by any great race except the Feejeean.

...

The intensity of her religious disposition,

the coercion it exercised over her life, was but one aspect of a

nature altogether ardent, theoretic, and intellectually consequent:

and with such a nature struggling in the bands of a narrow teaching,

hemmed in by a social life which seemed nothing but a labyrinth

of petty courses, a walled-in maze of small paths that led

no whither, the outcome was sure to strike others as at once

exaggeration and inconsistency. The thing which seemed to her best,

she wanted to justify by the completest knowledge; and not to live

in a pretended admission of rules which were never acted on.

Into this soul-hunger as yet all her youthful passion was poured;

the union which attracted her was one that would deliver her from her

girlish subjection to her own ignorance, and give her the freedom of

voluntary submission to a guide who would take her along the grandest path.

and

Celia was present while the plans were being examined, and observed

Sir James's illusion. "He thinks that Dodo cares about him,

and she only cares about her plans. Yet I am not certain that she

would refuse him if she thought he would let her manage everything

and carry out all her notions. And how very uncomfortable Sir

James would be! I cannot bear notions."

It was Celia's private luxury to indulge in this dislike.

She dared not confess it to her sister in any direct statement,

for that would be laying herself open to a demonstration that

she was somehow or other at war with all goodness. But on

safe opportunities, she had an indirect mode of making her negative

wisdom tell upon Dorothea, and calling her down from her rhapsodic

mood by reminding her that people were staring, not listening.

Celia was not impulsive: what she had to say could wait,

and came from her always with the same quiet staccato evenness.

When people talked with energy and emphasis she watched their faces

and features merely. She never could understand how well-bred

persons consented to sing and open their mouths in the ridiculous

manner requisite for that vocal exercise.

The Swerve

Excerpts:
At its height the Museum contained at least a half-million papyrus rolls systematically organized, labeled, and shelved according to a clever new system that its first director, a Homer scholar named Zenodotus, seems to have invented: the system was alphabetical order.

and

What was ridiculous about Christianity was not only its language- the crude style of the Gospels Greek resting in the barbarous otherness of Hebrew and Aramaic- but also its exaltation of divine humiliation and pain conjoined with a arrogant triumphalism. The Epicureans mockery of Christianity set the stage for the subsequent disappearance of the whole Epicurean school of thought: Plato and Aristotle, pagans who believed in the immortality of the soul, could ultimately be accommodated by a triumphant Christianity; Epicureanism could not.

Epicurus did not deny the existence of gods. Rather, he thought that if the concept of divinity made any sense at all, the gods could not possibly be concerned with anything but their own pleasures. Neither creators of the universe nor its destroyers, utterly indifferent to the doings of any beings other than themselves, they were deaf to our prayers or our rituals. The Incarnation, Epicureans scoffed, was a particularly absurd idea. Why should the humans think of themselves as so superior to bees, elephants, ants, or any of the available species, now or in eons to come, that god should take their form and not another? And why then, among all the varieties of humans, should he have taken the form of a jew? Why should anyone with any sense credit the idea of Providence, a childish idea contradicted by any rational adult’s experience and observation? Christians are like a council of frogs in a pond, croaking at the top of their lungs, “For our sakes was the world created.”

Christians could try, of course, to reverse the mockery. If such doctrines as the Incarnation and the resurrection of the body seemed absurd-“figments of diseased imagination," as one pagan put it, "and the futile fairy-tales invented by poets' fancy. What about the tales that pagans profess to believe?
But there is, of course, something uncomfortable about the “back-to-you” strategy, since the alleged ridiculousness of one set of beliefs hardly shores up the validity of another.

Christians knew, moreover, that many pagans did not believe in the literal truth of their own myths and that there were some-Epicureans prominent among them-who called into question virtually all religious systems and promises. Such enemies of faith found the doctrine of bodily resurrection particularly risible, since it was contradicted both by their scientific theory of atoms and by the evidence of their own senses: the rotting corpses that testified with nauseating eloquence to the dissolution of the flesh.

The early Church Father Tertullian vehemently insisted that, despite all appearances, everything would come back in the afterlife, down to the last details of the mortal body. He knew all too well the responses he would get from the doubters:

What will be the use of the hands themselves and the feet and all the working parts of the body, when even trouble about food will cease? What will be the use of the kidneys . . . and of the other genital organs of both sexes and the dwelling places of the foetus and the streams from the nurse’s breasts, when sexual intercourse and conception and upbringing alike will cease to be? Finally, what use will the whole body be, which will of course have absolutely nothing to do?

"The crowd mocks,” Tertullian wrote, “ judging that nothing is left over after death,” but they will not have the last laugh: "I will rather laugh at the crowd at the time when they are cruelly burning up themselves.” On the Day of Judgment, each man will be brought forth before the heavenly tribunal, not a piece of him, not a shadow, not a symbolic token, but rather the whole of him, as he lived on the earth. And that means teeth and intestines and genitals, whether or not their mortal functions have ceased forever. “Yes!” Tertullian addressed his pagan listeners. “We too in our day laughed at this. We are from among yourselves. Christians are made, not born!”

Some critics pointed out with a derisory smile that many features of the Christian vision were stolen from much more ancient pagan stories: a tribunal in which souls are judged, fire used for punishment in an underground prison house, a divinely beautiful paradise reserved for the spirits of the holy. But Christians replied that these ancient beliefs were all distorted reflections of the true Christian mysteries. The eventual success of this argumentative strategy is suggested by the very word we have been using for those who clung to the old polytheistic faith. Believers in Jupiter, Minerva, and Mars did not think of themselves as “pagans”: the word, which appeared in the late fourth century, is etymologically related to the word “peasant.” It is an insult, then, a sign that the laughter at rustic ignorance had decisively reversed direction.

The charge of doctrinal plagiarism was easier for Christians to deal with than the charge of absurdity. Pythagoreans who believed in bodily resurrection had the right general idea; it was simply an idea that needed correction. But Epicureans who said that the whole idea of resurrection was a grotesque violation of everything that we know about the physical universe could not be so easily corrected. It made some sense to argue with the former, but the latter were best simply silenced.

Though early Christians, Tertullian among them, found certain features in Epicureanism admirable-the celebration of friendship, the emphasis on charity and forgiveness, a suspicion of worldly ambition-by the early fourth century, the task had become clear: the atomists had to disappear. The followers of Epicurus had already aroused considerable enmity outside the Christian community. When the emperor known as Julian the Apostate (c. 331-363), who attempted to revive paganism against the mounting Christian onslaught, drew up a list of works that it was important for pagan priests to read, he also noted some titles that he explicitly Wished to exclude: “Let us not,” he wrote, “admit discourses by Epicureans.” jews, likewise, termed anyone who departed from the rabbinic tradition apikoros, an Epicurean. But Christians particularly found Epicureanism a noxious threat. If you grant Epicurus his claim that the soul is mortal, wrote Tertullian, the whole fabric of Christian morality unravels. For Epicurus, human suffering is always finite: “ if it is slight, he [Epicurus] says, you may despise it, if it is great it will not be long.” But to be Christian, Tertullian countered, is to believe that torture and pain last forever: “Epicurus utterly destroys religion,” wrote another Church Father; take Providence away, and “confusion and disorder will overtake life.”

Christian polemicists had to find a way to turn the current of mockery against Epicurus and his followers. Ridiculing the pagan pantheon did not work in this case, since Epicureanism eloquently dismantled the whole sacrificial worship of the gods and dismissed the ancient stories. What had to be done was to refashion the account of the founder Epicurus so that he became a figure of riotous excess.

Even more than the theory that the world consisted only of atoms and void, the main problem was the core ethical idea: that the highest good is the pursuit of pleasure and the diminution of pain. What had to be undertaken was the difficult project of making what appeared simply sane and natural-the ordinary impulses of all sentient creatures-seem like the enemy of the truth.

Centuries were required to accomplish this grand design, and it was never fully completed. But the grand outlines may be seen in the late third and early fourth century in the works of a North African convert from paganism to Christianity: Lactantius. Appointed tutor to the son of the emperor Constantine, who had established Christianity as the religion of the empire, Lactantius wrote a series of polemics against Epicureanism. That philosophy had, he acknowledges, a substantial following, "not because it brings forward any truth, but because the attractive name of pleasure invites many.” Christians must refuse the invitation and understand that pleasure is a code name for vice.

The task, for Lactantius, was not only to draw believers away from their pursuit of human pleasures; it was also to persuade them that God was not, as Epicureans believed, entirely absorbed within the orbit of divine pleasures and hence indifferent to the fate of humans. Instead, as Lactantius wrote in a
celebrated work written in 313 CE, God cared about humans, just as a father cared about his wayward child. And the sign of that care, he wrote, was anger. God was enraged at man that was the characteristic manifestation of His love and wanted to smite him over and over again, with spectacular, unrelenting violence.

A hatred of pleasure-seeking and a vision of God’s providential rage: these were death knells of Epicureanism, henceforward branded by the faithful as “insane.” Lucretius had urged the person who felt the prompting of sexual desire to satisfy it: “a dash of gentle pleasure sooths the sting.” (4.177) Christianity, as a story rehearsed by Gregory demonstrates, pointed in a different direction. The pious Benedict found himself thinking of a woman he had once seen, and, before he knew what was happening, his desires were aroused:

He then noticed a thick patch of nettles and briers next to him. Throwing his garment aside he flung himself into the sharp thorns and stinging nettles. There he rolled and tossed until his whole body was in pain and covered with blood. Yet, once he had conquered pleasure through suffering, his torn and bleeding skin served to drain the poison of temptation from his body. Before long, the pain that was burning his whole body had put out the fires of evil in his heart. It was by exchanging these two fires that he gained the victory over sin.

What worked for the saint in the early sixth century would, as monastic rules made clear, work for others. In one of the great Cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.

The infliction of pain was hardly unknown in the world Of Lucretius. The Romans were specialists in it, dedicating sums and huge arenas to public spectacles or violence. And it was not only in the Colosseum that Romans could glut themselves on injury. pain, and death. Plays and poems, based on the ancient myths, were often blood-drenched, as were paintings and sculptures. Violence was part of the fabric of everyday life. Schoolmasters and slaveholders were expected to flog their victims, and whipping was a frequent prelude to Roman executions. This is why in the gospel account, prior to his crucifixion, Jesus was tied to a column and scourged.

But for the pagans, in the great majority of these instances, pain was understood not as a positive value, a stepping stone to salvation, as it was by pious Christians intent on whipping themselves, but as an evil, something visited upon rule~ breakers, criminals, captives, unfortunate wretches, and-the only category with dignity-soldiers. Romans honored a brave soldier’s voluntary acceptance of pain, but that acceptance was far different from the ecstatic embrace celebrated in hundreds of convents and monasteries. The heroes of Roman stories willingly met what they could not, in good conscience, avoid or what they felt they had to endure in order to prove to their enemies their dauntless courage. Outside the orbit of that heroic obligation, there lay the special philosophical discipline that enabled the classical sage to regard inescapable pain-of kidney stones, for example-with equanimity. And for everyone, from the most exalted philosopher to the humblest artisan, there was the natural pursuit of pleasure.

In pagan Rome, the most extravagant version of this pursuit of pleasure came together in the gladiatorial arena with the most extravagant infliction and endurance of pain. If Lucretius offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pleasure principle, Christianity offered a moralized and purified version of the Roman pain principle. Early Christians, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, the sinfulness of mankind, and the anger of a just Father, found the attempt to cultivate pleasure manifestly absurd and dangerous. At best a trivial distraction, pleasure was at worst a demonic trap, figured in medieval art by those alluring women beneath whose gowns one can glimpse reptilian claws. The only life truly worth imitating-the life of Jesus-bore ample witness to the inescapable presence in mortal existence of sadness and pain, but not of pleasure. The earliest pictorial depictions of jesus were uniform in their melancholy sobriety. As every pious reader of Luke’s Gospel knew, Jesus wept, but there were no verses that described him laughing or smiling, let alone pursuing pleasure.

It was not difficult for Christians of the fifth and sixth centuries to find reasons to weep: the cities were falling apart, the fields were soaked in the blood of dying soldiers, robbery and rape were rampant. There had to be some explanation for the catastrophic behavior of human beings over so many generations, as if they were incapable of learning anything from their historical experience. Theology provided an answer deeper and more fundamental than this or that flawed individual or institution: humans were by nature corrupt. Inheritors of the sin of Adam and Eve, they richly deserved every miserable catastrophe that befell them; they needed to be punished; they had coming to them an endless diet of pain. Indeed, it was only through this pain that a small number could find the narrow gate to salvation.

The most ardent early believers in this doctrine, those fired by an explosive mix of fear, hope, and fierce enthusiasm, were determined to make the pain to which all humankind was condemned their active choice. In doing so, they hoped to pay to an angry God the dues of suffering that He justly and implacably demanded. They possessed something of the martial hardness admired by traditional Roman culture, but, with a few exceptions, the goal was not the achievement of Stoical indifference to pain. On the contrary. Their whole project depended on experiencing an intense sensitivity to hunger, thirst, and loneliness. And when they whipped themselves with thorny branches or struck themselves with jagged stones, they made no effort to suppress their cries of anguish. Those cries were part of the payment, the atonement that would, if they were successful, enable them to recover in the afterlife the happiness that Adam and Eve had lost.

By the year 600 there were over three hundred monasteries and convents in Italy and Gaul. Many of these were still small- little more than fortified villas, with their outbuildings-but they possessed a spiritual rationale and an institutional coherence that conferred upon them stability in an unstable world. Their inhabitants were drawn from those who felt compelled to transform their lives, to atone for their own sins and for the sins of others, to secure eternal bliss by turning their backs on ordinary pleasures. Over time, their numbers were supplemented by many less fervent souls who had in effect been given to the Church by their parents or guardians.

In monasteries and convents driven by the belief that redemption would only come through abasement, it is not surprising that forms of corporal punishment-virgarum verbera (hitting with rods), corporale supplicium (bodily punishment), ictus (blows), vapulatio (cudgeling), disciplina (whipping), and flagellatio-were routinely inflicted on community members who broke the rules. Disciplinary practices that would, in pagan society, have been disgraces inflicted only on social inferiors were meted out with something like democratic indifference to rank. Typically, the guilty party had to carry the rod that was used for the beating, and then sitting on the ground
and constantly repeating the words Mea culpa, submit to blows until the abbot or abbess was satisfied.

The insistence that punishment be actively embraced by the victims-literalized in the kissing of the rod--marked a deliberate Christian trampling on the Epicurean credo of pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain. After all, the experience of pain was not only punishment; it was a form of pious emulation. Christian hermits, brooding on the sufferings of the Saviour, mortified their flesh, in order to experience in their own bodies the torments that jesus had had to undergo. Though these acts of self-scourging began to be reported in late antiquity-they were novel and strange enough in the beginning to attract widespread attention-it was not until the eleventh century that a monastic reformer, the Italian Benedictine Peter Damian, established voluntary self-flagellation as a central ascetic practice acceptable to the Church.

It had taken a thousand years to win the struggle and secure the triumph of pain seeking. “Did our Redeemer not endure scourging?” Damian asked those critics who called into question the celebration of the whip. Weren’t the apostles and many of the saints and martyrs flogged? What better way to follow in their footsteps, what surer method of imitating Christ, than to suffer the blows that they suffered? To be sure, Damian concedes, in the case of these glorious predecessors, someone else Was doing the whipping. But in a world in which Christianity has triumphed, we have to do the whipping for ourselves. Otherwise the whole dream and doctrine of the imitation of Christ would have to be abandoned. “The body has to be shaped like a piece of wood,” explained one of the many texts that followed in Damian’s wake, “with beatings and whippings, with canes, scourges, and discipline. The body has to be tortured and starved, so that it submits to the spirit and takes perfect shape." In the pursuit of this spiritual goal, all boundaries, restraints, and inhibitions drop away.