Carlo Rovelli, "De rerum natura"

 

 

 

읽고 있는 Carlo Rovelli, "There Are Places ..."에 실린 에세이다.

Lucretius (사진)와 그의 시 De rerum natura (On the Nature of

Things 사물의 본성에 관하여) 에 대해, 얼마 전에 Stephen

Greenblatt 의 The Swerve: How the World Became Modern 을

읽었는데 이제 또 Rovelli 의 에세이로 읽게 되어 반가웠다. Rovelli 의

일곱 쪽짜리 이 에세이를 먼저 읽었으면 나는 Greebaltt 는 안 읽기로

했을 거다. (Rovelli 의 이 책이 대학생들 또래 청년들의 필독서로

꼽히면 좋겠다는 생각을 또 해본다.)

 

 

 

 

아래는 에세이에서 몇 구절:

 

"In 1417 the Florentine humanist Poggio Bracciolini discovered in

a German monastery a copy of the De rerum natura, the

extraordinary poem by Lucretius that had forgotten for millennia.

Bracciolini could harldly have imagined the influence that the

short text in poor condition.... The extent of that influence on the

Italian and wider European Renaissance, and in fact upon the

entire development of the modern world, is reconstructed by

Stephen Greenblatt."

 

"It isn't just the naturalism, rationalism and materialism of

Lucretius that are being awakened in Europe. It isin't only a

luminous and calm meditation on the beauty of the world and the

possibility of serenely accepting death. It is much more thatn this:

it is an articulate and complex conceptual structure for thinking

about reality, a new and radically different way of thinking to the

medieval one that have dominated for centuries."

 

"There is [in Lucretius] no fear of the gods, no intentionality or

causes in the world.... There is a profound love for nature, a

calm immersion in it, a recognition that we are part of it

ourselves."

 

"The echo of this mental universe that was resurrected by the

rediscovery of Lucretius reverberates directly in the pages of

authors ranging from Galileo to Kepler, ..., from Montaigne,

who in his essays cites Lucretius more than a hundred times,

down to Nweton, Dalton, Spinoza, Darwin and even Einstein,

who wrote beautifully on Lucretius: 'For anyone who is not

completely submerged in the spirit of our age ... on him wil

Lucretius's poem work its magic.'"