The book, a prose translation of Lucretius’ two-thousand-year-old poem “On the Nature of Things” (“De Rerum Natura”), was marked down to ten cents, and I bought it as much for the cover as for the classical account of the material universe.Īncient physics is not a particularly promising subject for vacation reading, but sometime over the summer I idly picked up the book. Under a crescent moon, high above the earth, two pairs of legs-the bodies were missing-were engaged in what appeared to be an act of celestial coition. On one of my forays, I was struck by an extremely odd paperback cover, a detail from a painting by the Surrealist Max Ernst.
They were jumbled together in bins through which I would rummage until something caught my eye. I had very little pocket money, but the bookstore would routinely sell its unwanted titles for ridiculously small sums.
When I was a student, I used to go at the end of the school year to the Yale Co-op to see what I could find to read over the summer. Lucretius anticipated the core scientific vision of modernity.
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