The Other Nature of Things, Not That One

Lucretius Speaks and Nobody Listened:

I love The Nature of Things. With David Suzuki. But that’s not what I’m here to talk about. Lucretius swoops down on us with nice poetry. He manages to address atomic theory, Evolutionary theory, love, and basically the nature of almost everything. I love this book, or poem, or whatever. I love the way he says things. If I were to put down all my favourite lines and explain why they were my favourite this would turn into a rather large post. Instead, I will pick a few and share them. 

“All things decompose back to the elemental particles from which they rose” (10). I like this line because I have always said that when I die I want to be left naked somewhere in the wilderness where I can decompose back to the earth. I know it would stink and I know my naked and rotting corpse is nothing pretty, but this is my wish. I wish this because I feel like that is where we belong.

“See how nature refashions one thing from another, and won’t allow a birth unless it’s midwived by another’s death” (11). I like this and I don’t know why. I think it is because it speaks to a balance in the universe. We can read this the wrong way and check statistics and exact times of births and deaths, or we could accept it and take ourselves out of the situation. When I say ‘ourselves’ I really mean our egos. And when I say ‘out of the situation’ I mean properly assess our place in the situation. We think we’re the only ones this applies to. The situation is much larger than us. We are mere humans. The universe balances itself out, whether we like it or not.

“The truth is, there are other fish in the sea. The truth is, too, we’ve lived without her up to now” (142). The reason this is great is because so many people ‘in love’ say really stupid things. They act like the end of the world is nigh when love could be unrequited. The fact of the matter is that it isn’t. There is no better way to say this than Lucretius says it. And the next time you’re in love and want to say really dumb things feel free to tell yourself this, to comfort yourself, to self-soothe, to wake yourself up.

The things Lucretius says feel right to me. A couple thousand years ago some guy said some cool stuff, it seems to be accurate, how come we haven’t really listened?