Happy New Year! I began the new year as I ended the old, contended in reading:
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The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt
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This morning I finished Stephen Greenblatt's
The Swerve, which recounts the pre-Renaissance rediscovery of Lucretius' Epicurean poem "On the Nature of Things". I've long loved Epicureanism's championing and prioritization on life simple joys, a theme frequently revisited throughout the work. In one section, the book's hero, Poggio Bracciolini, after observing bathers in the
German town of Baden,
described his reactions to the bathers' happy lifestyle in a letter to a friend:
"I often envy their calm and I hate our perversity of spirit, for we are always searching, always hunting, always turning sky, earth, and sea upside down in order to make a fortune, content with no gain, appeased by no money. We are terrified of future catastrophes and are thrown into a continuous state of misery and anxiety, and for fear of becoming miserable, we never cease to be so, always panting for riches and never giving our souls or bodies a moment's peace. But those who are content with little live day by day and treat any day like a feast day. They do not seek wealth that will do them little good but enjoy their own property and do not worry about the future; if anything goes wrong, they bear it optimistically. And so they are enriched by this saying: 'He has lived, as long as he has lived well.'"
I read Poggio's words at an apt moment. As I develop resolutions and goals for the upcoming year, Poggio's reflections are helpfully orienting.
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