60 in 60: #24 - Lucretius' Sensation and Sex (Penguin's Great Ideas)

This blog post is part of my ongoing "60 Books in 60 Days" encounter with the Penguin Great Ideas series--the Guardian's book site of the week and mentioned on the Penguin blog. (Their latest post comments on the first 20.) From mid-December to mid-February, I will read one book in the series each night and post a blog entry about it the next morning. For more on this beautifully designed series, visit Penguin's page about the books.Sensation and Sexby Lucretius (99-55 BC)Memorable Line"For the barrenness of the males is due in some cases to the over-coarse grain of the seed, in others to excessive fineness and fluidity. The fine seed, because it cannot stick fast in its place, slips quickly away and returns abortive. The coarser type, because it is emitted in too cohesive a form, either does not travel with enough momentum, or fails to penetrate where it is required..."The SkinnyA sometimes ornate, often matter-of-fact, always strange (in the best way) discussion of love, sex, nascent atomic theory, and soul-death.Relevance? Argument?I'm not being fair to Lucretius by quoting the Memorable Line above, but it's worth getting out of the way that you may be jolted out of the narrative of his essay from time to time by statements similar to that one.But you'll also be astonished by the rough beauty and surprising subtlety to the lushness of the prose. Lucretius, to me, seems like a novelist writing essays, like Woolf earlier in the series. He is so much in and of the world, letting it wash over him, that he has developed an eye that is somewhere between that of the novelist and the scientist. What this means for the modern reader is that even with the occasional clangs, every word of "Sensation and Sex" (and presumably its companion essay "Life and Mind"*) is vibrantly alive. It also means that I didn't really care if some of his conclusions have been disproved since. It is enough that he allows himself to be a receptor to the world, and that he can write like a poet at times.And, whereas Montaigne's dissembling and asides annoyed me, Lucretius' seem like a kind of blessing, as at the beginning of the title essay "Sensation and Sex," when he rhapsodizes, "I am blazing a trail through pathless tracts of the Muses' Pierian realms, where no foot has ever trod before. What joy it is to light upon virgin springs and drink their waters. What joy to pluck new flowers..." Now, this kind of (literally) flowery prose could be the kind of thing Joyce parodied at times in Ulysses, but in the context of Lucretius' essay, it works. It serves as a kind of entrance to and embrace of his world of atoms, images, smells, sounds, and tastes.I know Lucretius is talking about the physical world--looking at it from a micro level and building up from there--but something about the style has an eccentricity and feel to it that makes me see the text as more about art and the many forms of art than science. Just read a paragraph like this one:Now I will embark on an explanation of a highly relevant fact, the existence of what we call the "images" of things, a sort of outer skin perpetually peeled off the surface of objects and flying this way and that through the air. It is these whose impact scares our minds, whether waking or sleeping, on those occasions when we catch a glimpse of strange shapes and phantoms of the dead.That, to me, is one description of what it is to be a receptive writer of fiction. In his grappling with the invisible world, and his grappling with the nature of our senses, he's deconstructing the novelist's tools right in front of the reader, while still giving them a sense of mystery, because although he clearly yearns to, he cannot know the full truth of them. He cannot penetrate the veil--he can only use his observations to make determinations; the same faulty senses he's trying to describe. (It's a subject I grappled with when trying to come up with a new sense for the underground inhabitants of my fantastical city of Ambergris, and I think for a modern reader that's as close as you can get to the sensation of being Lucretius back in the BCs: trying to describe something you cannot really describe.)But Lucretius does a damn good job of trying, and sometimes creates a kind of alternate reality as rich as our own, as when he writes, "Lastly, the reflections that we see in mirrors or in water or any polished surface have the same appearance as actual objects. They must therefore be composed of films given off by those objects. There exist therefore flimsy but accurate replicas of objects, individually invisible but such that, when flung back in a rapid succession of recoils from the flat surface of mirrors they produce a visible image." (I'm not a physicist, so what seems like lovable crazy-town to me may be close to fact.)Maybe one reason why I have been so sympathetic to every Greek and Roman I've read is that each one has seemed passionately engaged with their world-either the human or the natural world. There is none of the bloodless lifting of the eyes to the next life--there is total commitment to this life.A detail like this one--come down through twenty centuries through the time machine of words--is worth a thousand platitudes to me:Or again, consider those substances that emit a pungent odour--all-heal, bitter wormwood, oppressive southernwood, the astringent tang of centaury. If you lightly crush one of these herbs between two fingers, the scent will cling to your hand, but its particles will be quite invisible.Lucretius knows that there is more mystery and spirit in the single leaf of that herb--enough to study for a lifetime--than in contemplation of a thousand angels on the head of a pin. When we lift our heads to consider the next world without having deeply engaged this one, we do a disservice to the complexity in front of us.* I am deeply disturbed that I had to read this text quickly, and the thought of going back and reading "Life and Mind" as quickly was too depressing to entertain, and so I'm saving that one, along with a re-read of the title essay, for another day.ConclusionA wonderfully odd proto-Decadent book, sometimes luminous and sometimes awkward but always fascinating. I have an image of Lucretius wandering around the city hitting on women using lines from it, since it's as lush as any poem by a Romantic. I also have an image of Lucretius starring in Dr. Strangelove and asking people about their bodily fluids...Question for ReadersSo, what do you think about sex...and sensation?Next up, Cicero's An Attack on an Enemy of Freedom...