William Ellery Leonard (1876–1944)

It's a translation; that alone is enough to scare. However, William Ellery Leonard did a great job in conveying to text a kind of musicality that, in the lack of knowledge of Latin to read the masterpiece of Lucretius with the original wording, I must assume is coveys much of its poetic sense.

Lucretius magnum opus is like a flashing sign, frenetically pointing out a route for civilization, one that, unfortunately, was missed by many centuries to come. The work, in its structure, is magnificent. The author guides his readers through endless examples of how nature works, from bottom-up and back again. The atoms, endless, with many, but too many, different forms, make the whole of the "Great All", the all that we all around touch and feel. For sense is what determines our perception, and sense shows us that we are nothing other that a part of nature, herself subject to the many swerves of the its smallest constituent atomic elements.

Most striking, still today, are his descriptions of the 'multitudinous' complexity of a very granular world, a world that because of its granularity allows for the whole spectacle of the ineffable Nature; a world where no gods are needed when all you have to do to understand its motives is to look around and read on nature's own examples. And that's the power of his artistry. For Lucretius oeuvre still makes us ponder how things fit so tightly to one another, almost as matching pieces of a puzzle that still strike us today as much wondrous as it is absurd.

Even if outdated, the view is sill compelling. If one is to find any kind of meaning, that meaning will have to bow to Nature's many caprices, for only in Nature any possibility of answer lies. Why read Lucretius? Because it will give you back some sense of wonder, that kind of view that only when you were a child you allowed yourself to have. We, as he himself intuited, are products of our natural environment, and that, in itself, is still a valid basis to come to terms with your own most horrid drama of being a being finite by nature. This treatise is, then, not just a failed attempt to explain the world — rather a way to inhabit it, and accept its conditions, all the while not falling to the trappings of thinking it to be a lasting nightmare. For all things come to pass, even the Great All of the universe. Why, then, bother with what's of no concern of ours? Just as existence is no concern of ours before we were born, so too it will become after we die.… (mehr)