If you haven’t read it, the poem is an exercise in antique “science,” explaining the world from a rationalist, materialistic point of view, and in particular pointing out that there are no gods, no afterlife, no heaven, no hell. You just live, and when you die, well, it’s all over—peace, a sweet night’s rest from which you never waken.
Several people—I am not one of them—have found Lucretius message to be sweet balm, and Dr. Greenblatt (apparently, he teaches Shakespeare somewhere, but the Times isn’t specific about it) is one of them, because as a child he worried constantly about death—the death of his mother, not his own, because apparently Mom did. According to Mr. Garner “She’d stop on the street, as if about to keel over from a heart attack, and ask the young Mr. Greenblatt to touch the ‘vein pulsing in her neck.’”
Uh, doc? Dwight? Dwight’s editor? It’s arteries that pulse, not veins.
Afterwords
Mr. Garner also tells us that Dr. Greenblatt’s fascination with De Rerum Natura began when “He plucked it from a Yale Co-op bargain bin for 10 cents, partly because he liked its sexy cover, a pair of disembodied legs floating above the Earth in an apparent act of ‘celestial coition.’” Well, if it was “celestial coition,” it probably would have been two pairs of legs, because, you know, those things do come in pairs.
