Was re-reading this article about Lucretius and the rediscovery of “On the Nature of Things." I love this aspect of reading, that someone reaches out to you from beyond the grave.
The Answer Man
An ancient poem was rediscovered—and the world swerved.
By Stephen Greenblatt
Lucretius, who was born about a century before Christ, was emphatically not our contemporary. He thought that worms were spontaneously generated from wet soil, that earthquakes were the result of winds caught in underground caverns, that the sun circled the earth. But, at its heart, “On the Nature of Things” persuasively laid out what seemed to be a strikingly modern understanding of the world. Every page reflected a core scientific vision—a vision of atoms randomly moving in an infinite universe—imbued with a poet’s sense of wonder. Wonder did not depend on the dream of an afterlife; in Lucretius it welled up out of a recognition that we are made of the same matter as the stars and the oceans and all things else. And this recognition was the basis for the way he thought we should live—not in fear of the gods but in pursuit of pleasure, in avoidance of pain...
There are moments, rare and powerful, in which a writer, long vanished, seems to stand in your presence and speak to you directly, as if he bore a message meant for you above all others. When I first read “On the Nature of Things,” it struck such a chord within me.
www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/08/08/the-answer-man-stephen-greenblatt