The Swerve (37 page)

Perhaps too Hutchinson found the manuscript strangely difficult to destroy. “I turned it
²³
into English,” she wrote, “in a room where my children practiced the several qualities they were taught with their tutors, and I numbered the syllables of my translation by the threads of the canvas I wrought in, and set them down with a pen and ink that stood by me.”

Lucretius insisted that those things that seemed completely detached from the material world—thoughts, ideas, fantasies,
souls
themselves—were nonetheless inseparable from the atoms that constituted them, including in this instance the pen, the ink, and the threads of the needlework Hutchinson used to count the syllables in her lines of verse. In his theory, even vision, so seemingly immaterial, depended on tiny films of atoms that constantly emanated from all things and, as images or simulacra, floated through the void until they struck the perceiving eye. Thus it was, he explained, that people who saw what they thought to be ghosts were falsely persuaded of the existence of an afterlife. Such apparitions were not in reality the souls of the dead but films of atoms still floating through the world after the death and dissolution of the person from whom they had emanated. Eventually, the atoms in these films too would be dispersed, but for the moment they could astonish and frighten the living.

The theory now only makes us smile, but perhaps it can serve as an image of the strange afterlife of Lucretius’ poem, the poem that almost disappeared forever, dispersed into random atoms, but that somehow managed to survive. It survived because a succession of people, in a range of places and times and for reasons that seem largely accidental, encountered the material object—the papyrus or parchment or paper, with its inky marks attributed to Titus Lucretius Carus—and then sat down to make material copies of their own. Sitting in the room with her children, counting the syllables of translated verses on the threads of her canvas, the Puritan Lucy Hutchinson was serving in effect as one of the transmitters of the atomic particles that Lucretius had set in motion centuries and centuries earlier.

By the time Hutchinson reluctantly sent her translation to Anglesey, the idea of what she called “the foppish, casual dance of atoms” had already long penetrated the intellectual imagination of England. Edmund Spenser had written an ecstatic and
strikingly
Lucretian hymn to Venus; Francis Bacon had ventured that “In nature nothing
²⁴
really exists besides individual bodies”; Thomas Hobbes had reflected wryly on the relationship between fear and religious delusions.

In England, as elsewhere in Europe, it had proved possible, though quite difficult, to retain a belief in God
²⁵
as the creator of atoms in the first place. Thus Isaac Newton, in what has been called one of the most influential pieces of writing in the history of science, declared himself an atomist, making what appears to be a direct allusion to the title of Lucretius’ poem. “While the Particles continue entire,” he remarked, “they may compose Bodies of one and the same Nature and Texture in all Ages: But should they wear away, or break in pieces, the Nature of Things depending on them, would be changed.” At the same time, Newton was careful to invoke a divine maker. “It seems probable to me,” Newton wrote in the second edition of the
Opticks
(1718),

That God in the Beginning
²⁶
form’d Matter in solid, massy, hard, impenetrable, moveable Particles, of such Sizes and Figures, and with such other Properties, and in such Proportions to Space, as most conduced to the End for which he form’d them; and that these primitive Particles being Solids, are incomparably harder than any porous Bodies compounded of them; even so very hard, as never to wear or break in pieces; no ordinary Power being able to divine what God himself made one in the first creation.

For Newton, as for other scientists from the seventeenth century to our own time, it remained possible to reconcile atomism with Christian faith. But Hutchinson’s fears proved well grounded. Lucretius’ materialism helped to generate and
support
the skepticism of the likes of Dryden and Voltaire and the programmatic, devastating disbelief expressed in Diderot, Hume, and many other Enlightenment figures.

What lay ahead, beyond the horizon of even these farsighted figures, were the astonishing empirical observations and experimental proofs that put the principles of ancient atomism on a whole different plane. When in the nineteenth century he set out to solve the mystery of the origin of human species, Charles Darwin did not have to draw on Lucretius’ vision of an entirely natural, unplanned process of creation and destruction, endlessly renewed by sexual reproduction. That vision had directly influenced the evolutionary theories of Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, but Charles could base his arguments on his own work in the Galápagos and elsewhere. So too when Einstein wrote of atoms, his thought rested on experimental and mathematical science, not upon ancient philosophical speculation. But that speculation, as Einstein himself knew and acknowledged, had set the stage for the empirical proofs upon which modern atomism depends. That the ancient poem could now be safely left unread, that the drama of its loss and recovery could fade into oblivion, that Poggio Bracciolini could be forgotten almost entirely—these were only signs of Lucretius’ absorption into the mainstream of modern thought.

Among those for whom Lucretius was still a crucial guide, before this absorption had become complete, was a wealthy Virginia planter with a restless skeptical intelligence and a scientific bent. Thomas Jefferson owned at least five Latin editions of
On the Nature of Things
, along with translations of the poem into English, Italian, and French. It was one of his favorite books, confirming his conviction that the world is nature alone and that nature consists only of matter. Still more, Lucretius helped to shape Jefferson’s confidence that ignorance and fear were not necessary components of human existence.

Jefferson took this ancient inheritance in a direction that Lucretius could not have anticipated but of which Thomas More, back in the early sixteenth century, had dreamed. Jefferson had not, as the poet of
On the Nature of Things
urged, withdrawn from the fierce conflicts of public life. Instead, he had given a momentous political document, at the founding of a new republic, a distinctly Lucretian turn. The turn was toward a government whose end was not only to secure the lives and the liberties of its citizens but also to serve “the pursuit of Happiness.” The atoms of Lucretius had left their traces on the Declaration of Independence.

On August 15, 1820, the seventy-seven-year-old Jefferson wrote to another former president, his friend John Adams. Adams was eighty-five, and the two old men were in the habit of exchanging views on the meaning of life, as they felt it ebb away. “I [am] obliged
²⁷
to recur ultimately to my habitual anodyne,” Jefferson wrote:

“I feel: therefore I exist.” I feel bodies which are not myself: there are other existencies then. I call them
matter
. I feel them changing place. This gives me
motion
. Where there is an absence of matter, I call it
void
, or
nothing
, or
immaterial space
. On the basis of sensation, of matter and motion, we may erect the fabric of all the certainties we can have or need.

These are the sentiments that Lucretius had most hoped to instill in his readers. “I am,” Jefferson wrote
²⁸
to a correspondent who wanted to know his philosophy of life, “an Epicurean.”