The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began

by Stephen Greenblatt

And there were the Jews, with the conical hats and the yellow badges that the Christian authorities forced them to wear, so that they could be easily identified as objects of contempt and hatred.

These strange, layered manuscripts—called palimpsests; from the Greek for “scraped again”—have served as the source of several major works from the ancient past that would not otherwise be known.

Perhaps the route to accessing these ancient texts lay in these.

The resemblance to the design of public libraries in our own society is no accident: our sense that a library is a public good and our idea of what such a place should look like derive precisely from a model created in Rome several thousand years ago.

As are so many other ideas borrowed from this great civilization

The core of this vision may be traced back to a single incandescent idea: that everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructible building blocks, irreducibly small in size, unimaginably vast in number. The Greeks had a word for these invisible building blocks, things that, as they conceived them, could not be divided any further: atoms.

Bloody brilliant, to have conceived this more than 2000 years ago!

What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure.

The essence of atheism

The murder of Hypatia signified more than the end of one remarkable person; it effectively marked the downfall of Alexandrian intellectual life and was the death knell26 for the whole intellectual tradition that underlay the text that Poggio recovered so many centuries later.

The movie Agora captures this beautifully.

Compared to the unleashed forces of warfare and of faith, Mount Vesuvius was kinder to the legacy of antiquity.

Telling indeed.

In one of the great cultural transformations in the history of the West, the pursuit of pain triumphed over the pursuit of pleasure.

Kinda dumb and i dont believe that. The West is certainly back to pleasure seeking with a vengeance.

the “Donation of Constantine,” the document in which the Roman emperor purportedly gave possession of the Western Empire to the pope, was a forgery.

Wow!!! Really?

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.

... so said Lucretius

But being liberated from harmful illusions is not the same as disillusionment.

In fact it is very liberating

“either the whole or the most part of human happiness” lies in the pursuit of pleasure.

Absolutely true, in fact there is no need to believe any other crap.

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.

This should be made into the constitution of the planet

fear might be eliminated in the philosopher’s garden, among a tiny, enlightened elite, but it cannot be eliminated from an entire society,

Exacty the reason why organised religion exists!