The Swerve: How the World Became Modern

by Stephen Greenblatt

What human beings can and should do, he wrote, is to conquer their fears, accept the fact that they themselves and all the things they encounter are transitory, and embrace the beauty and the pleasure of the world.

Of all the ancient masterpieces, this poem is one that should certainly have disappeared, finally and forever, in the company of the lost works that had inspired it. That it did not disappear, that it surfaced after many centuries and began once again to propagate its deeply subversive theses, is something one could be tempted to call a miracle.

He posited instead what he called a “swerve,”—Lucretius’ principal Latin word for it was clinamen—an unexpected, unpredictable movement of matter.