On reading one's library and one's life

Holman Hunt's Lux Mundi

Holman Hunt is a good choice to stand for Victorian Anglican religious painting.  It is allegorical and it was highly regarded and much discussed in its time.  It is not exactly pre-Raphaelite, but Holman Hunt belongs with them.  Lux Mundi is meant to be contemplated.  I was looking for some small personal devotional books, which I know I have somewhere, but I couldn't find them, and their pictures, in pen and ink, in a vaguely retro style (pious puke, I'm afraid), are understandably not widely reproduced.  If someone has a St. Augustine's Prayer Book, for example, its frontispiece (in the original edition, before 1967) is in the style in question, making the Keble College "Light of the World" look like a true masterpiece, as indeed, in some respects, it is.  Devotionally they are equivalent.

But why was I looking for these things?

Radio listeners were invited to contribute their favorite opening sentences to novels, and one choice was:

"Take my camel, dear," said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass."

This is the first sentence of Rose Macaulay's "The Towers of Trebizond" (1956).  It is in short, concrete words, arresting only for their bizarre context.  It is her last novel.  No one can fault her writing, though not everyone likes the same kinds of good writing.  I had to hunt a long time to locate my copy of it.  I still don't feel like reading it again, after 40 years.  Coming as it did, well after "Pleasure of Ruins", a proper travel essays book (but my own pleasure in antiquities is more archaeological than hers and if I'm going to read travel books I prefer those, like Ramsay's, devoted to learning, rather than to ruins for ruins' sake), the story has a heavier admixture of her travel description than I like, and I feel uneasy about some of its religious consciousness.  Miss Macaulay handled religion better in her earlier novels.  Finally, I remember not knowing whether to laugh or cry at the last fifty pages, where an ape is taught to drive a car, and Laurie, the first person narrator, is sacrificed to the realization of unalterable ethical and moral categories.  Of course, one can't be loose and unprincipled and careless of one's effect on others without coming to pay for it, but one doesn't need theology to teach it.  Anyone with any notion of fair play and of what one's own mind and body require, who is capable of learning it, comes to acknowledge what has been called Natural Law.  One needn't spoil a perfectly good novel by making its characters' personalities collapse to serve an orthodox resolution.  Evelyn Waugh's "Brideshead Revisited" is similarly sacrificed, compromised.

Reading Rose Macaulay belongs to my years of engagement with Anglican worship.  A friend gave them to me, the retired librarian with whom I have corresponded since he left Berkeley with a Master's in Librarianship.  He often sent me de-accessioned books that he thought I might like.  He certainly was not an Anglican himself, but he knew the authors that were.  Now all the pre-WWII novels by Rose Macaulay are out of copyright and free on your Kindle or the like.  But I have the Boni Liveright edition, 1924, but not first printing, of "Told By An Idiot", which was the first Rose Macaulay that I read, my friend pj having sent it in 1968.  In the next few years I read it over and over.  It remains my favorite of her books, covering four generations of a family, most of whom go through all the English varieties of religious experience.  It is quite funny but not trivial, providing, too, an excellent sketch of literary and artistic fads and men's and women's fashions.  Its principal character has cancer on the last page but bears it much as Christopher Hitchens would expect her to.  If it resembles any other novel by an author born in the 1880s, it is Virginia Woolf's "The Waves", though Woolf is, well, a greater writer.  It puts to shame costume soap operas like "Downton Abbey", but Nancy Mitford's novels, though free of religious angles, are comparable.  ("Downton Abbey" does have very nice cars and clothes and hair styles, I admit).

As for my books and my life, however: When I returned to secular life and moved to Louisiana, where I'd never been before, I got my books sent here (USPS Book Rate no longer exists, though).  I wanted  to have and handle and read the books that I knew.  The religious ones still troubled me.  They seemed so alien by the 1980s and yet myself who had been so involved in them was not other than part of myself.  I had to have those books, and even the surviving children's books, to gradually put together continuous memory.  A religious novitiate deliberately disengages a person from the past.  

I still won't read "The Towers of Trebizond" or her late Letters all the way through, but I am delighted to have come back to "Told By An Idiot" and read it with an older person's detachment and no less pleasure than 40 years ago (c. 1972-2012).  One thing that prompted me was the online Comments by young women that revealed how much they missed.  I am so glad to have read Beerbohm and all the others that figure in it.  The young seem to take it as simply a problem novel about generational tensions!
I had had to discipline myself when I was in the convent to endure and try not to judge bad art and bad prose.  One of my problems in Religion was that it required as much dishonesty as some problems with the Bible (though no Episcopalian order asked anyone to accept Creation literally), but bad art and bad prose are just as radically unacceptable to me as bad science.  One could never ask just how much had to be accepted (in fact, I think, there was no requirement, except not to scandalize the simpler ones among us, as good old Paul enjoined to the Corinthians).  You can see, nothing that has engaged a decade of one's life is ever lost.  I think it would be dangerous to repress it, actually.

Museum T-Shirts and Onesies

British Museum T-Shirt with tondo of Epiktetos's early red-figure cup: Youth and Dancing Girl

I had wanted to post a note on the cup-painter Epiktetos (his own signature: it may mean that he was a slave or the son of one or for some other reason had the nickname), who was the artist, in fact, of whom Sir John Beazley wrote that you can draw differently but not better.

But unless I went back to reproductions of pre-photographic drawings, I couldn't find good images out of copyright.

I resorted to taking a snapshot of the British Museum's T-shirt that a friend had brought to me (above).  Subtlety may be lost, but Epiktetos's elegant style actually is a great designer's choice for a T-shirt.  It even makes plain why Beazley admired it so much.  Note, too, that Beazley's appreciations were, in part, grounded in his own practice of making drawings of the artists he was studying, and his are among the very best.  I know of no better way to learn a style of drawing.

But last week I saw this year's first prize winning news photo, by Samuel Aranda, in a favorite blog, Thesprotia News.  It is a truly great photograph: unforgettable and beautiful.  The blog also provides a link to the competition page.  Click on edô at the end of their article.  Some of the other winners are great, too, but this one has the finality of the greatest images.

It reminded me of a very great painting, the Avignon Pietà, which I found very well represented in a Google Images page.  In comparison, even other famous Pietàs seem rather stylistic virtuoso images.
But then I saw something (the 34th image on my screen in the array that the link provides) that makes the British Museum T-shirt itself seem reverent, the Avignon Pietà reproduced on one of those infant garments (an undershirt with a crotch) that young mothers call onesies.
Considering some of the appropriations of this and other Pietà, I do not want to object to trafficking this one on baby clothes, but I don't know why!

A modest Royal note

Though I cannot claim to be a faithful watcher of the British Royal Family, as one whose entire childhood in the 1930s and through World War II included so much about the Princesses, I had to notice something I never imagined seeing: a Diamond Jubilee.  I suppose that as a child I thought it was something that Queen Victoria celebrated when my grandparents were young.
Without fantasizing about the Queen, I have to admire her wholeheartedly.  It seems to me that she possesses the grace and earnest modesty of her parents.  And, though I am younger than she is, I do belong to the same generation, even though American, and have some notion of the changes that persons of all sorts have watched and adjusted to during a lifetime of more than three quarters of a century.
I see that there will be celebrations next summer, doubtless televised, but the actual anniversary date has made me recall many events, many images--in short, the history of about three quarters of a century.

A Photographic Entr'acte

The Imaginative Power of Forms in Light

I often wonder whether the suggestive forms that I see, photographed "straight" (point-and-shoot if you like, though framing and vantage point are not considerations that many point-and-shoot photographers are wont to think of before pressing the button) will convey what I hope for.  Digital cameras are very good now in capturing the really neutral gray of a paved street or a concrete sidewalk; they even get the greens of plants and the lavender of agapanthus.  Also, as many are discovering, the little miracle in the new iPhone is just that, miraculous.
Opposite my house, in the parkway (i.e., the grassy or flowery area between the sidewalk and the curb) there is one of the tallest pin oaks (or swamp oaks or red oaks, all current names) in the neighborhood, where the oldest houses are now nearing a hundred years.  No true oak tree, even if not the noble quercus robur, can get by in a parkway no more than a meter wide.  All over the older neighborhoods in southern US cities, the Department responsible for gutters and drains and the like has industriously cut the obtrusive roots back.  They look like parts of carcasses badly mangled.
Often, besides, they recall to the mind's eye mankind's own creations, in art.  Not always.  Today, after being soaked by two inches of constant rainfall, this one (above), which I called snarly and gnarly in the Picasa album,  immediately made me remember the Shang bail-handled bronze vessel in the shape of a tiger or a bear (depending on the interpretation) which is swallowing a man.  It also evoked all the most powerful Guardians of the great Chinese and Japanese shrines.  When the root is half dry, and the colors are differentiated, the suggestion is strongest.  That the 'head' seems to strain against the mossy stretched bark only makes it more like a living thing.  Of course, what it evokes for each viewer depends on his or her previous visual experience and how great its effect has been.  In my case, Prof. Otto Maenchen-Helfen's course, Art 1D, a survey of the art of India, China, and Japan, was the initiation.  In 1953, there were not so many picture books readily available, and, a Freshman, I had never seen Asian art, except for a few bamboo paintings reproduced in women's magazines—not even in Art News.*  I continued taking his courses, eventually even graduate seminars, though eventually I had to choose between Greece and China.  Professor Maenchen was a mysterious idol to his devoted students.  He came from Vienna.  He had spent time in a Tibetan monastery.  He invited his graduate students to meet in his home (in fact, near the end of his career, he had a weak heart).  He treated us with interest and respect.  What I never guessed until I ran across it several months ago in a Note in Mary Gabriel's biography of Karl and Jenny Marx was that he had been the co-author of one himself, years before he came to Berkeley.  Not only did he never discuss political ideologies with us, such a life episode could not compare with his knowing everything, it seemed, about the Huns, for example.  He seemed far above any politics!  I shall never forget him; he was the most wonderful person and scholar imaginable.  So I think myself most fortunate to see Asian images in other things.
In the warm and humid atmosphere a few days ago, when I walked around to the other side of the same tree, standing on the sidewalk and seeing a bit of the pavement beyond, without having any notion of its "standing for" anything other than spreading roots and a dry fallen twig, I had a visual feeling about it that reminded me of Japanese gardening and of album-leaf paintings.  Literally, it is just another plain photo, unaltered by any post-processing, with no additional cropping (since I had seen what I wanted, though if I had wanted a square image I'd have cropped, of course).  Aesthetically (the Greek verb, aisthanomai means to perceive through the senses), it is for me something quite different.
It was a good afternoon's taking pictures for me.  You can find them all, dated Jan 22, in the same album as the snarly, gnarly root.

*Actually, so long as the gallery was in existence, C. T. Loo had a full page advertisement in every issue of Art News.  Some of the best ones were for Shang and Zhou ritual bronzes.  I had had that periodical for several years (as I related above, a bill collector who had to give up on my mother took pity on the 12-year-old who had stayed home from school, and brought me a stack of Art News).  I kept them for years and pored over them.  Indeed, I had them until 1973.  So it is remarkable that only when I took a course in Asian art, and had a boxful of University Prints to go with it, did I pay serious attention to C. T. Loo (Sherman Lee's big Asian equivalent to Janson's History of Art was still a decade in the future).  C. T. Loo keeps recurring, most lately in Edmund de Waal's Hare with Amber Eyes.  Nothing given to an observant child is truly wasted.  If only one is fortunate to live long enough it all comes together to enrich the decades when hiking all over the world's great cities is too difficult (since true aesthetes seldom get rich).

Cosmological Words

Nothing and Chaos, with or without Strings

Here is the NASA link to the photograph used to illustrate, in part, a galaxy cluster at the limit of visible space.  See Lawrence Krauss, A Universe from Nothing, 2012, Ch. 2 (on a Kindle, search CMBR, ff. or gravitational lensing where, at "location 622-625" the NASA photo is reproduced to illustrate it).

Krauss, whatever other physicists may be saying right now, is incomparably the best teacher among them, barring perhaps only Richard Feynman.  He isn't merely being cute when he says that everything, and you and I, are literally made of stardust: our basic constituent elements were born in the cores of the first stars.  Before that there was only plasma.  That is OK in physics, I guess, but it's misleading if you think Greek (for the word is Greek).  Plasma is any substance that one can model things in, so think of the God of Genesis 2, or of Prometheus modeling Pandora.  Generally, though, he is wondrously good with words.  He knows that 'data' are plural, and he is as concrete as it is possible to be.  He knows that his readers are not stupid but also that it is hopeless to try to explain Dirac's equation (for example) to them.  He can be humorous, but without being low, when the context permits: "Infinity is not a pleasant quantity, however, at least as far as a physicist is concerned", a neat rebuke to the metaphysical tribe.  Before I say any more I'll have to read the book a second time, but I do not hesitate to recommend it heartily (or you can take Richard Dawkins' "Afterword", if you want his authority).  It is a wonderful book to read, only I have read it so fast that I need to read it again.  As my heading indicates, he does not like string theory.
What I can address, though, is the antiquity of his mentality.  Epicurus and Lucretius, even the pre-Socratics,  are downright modern by comparison with Hesiod.
Hesiod, who in the Theogony is not, I suppose, later than Homer (once the obligatory window dressing to the Muses is done—it is not his own), begins, II. 116, ff., "First of all Chaos came into being, next broad-bosomed earth... Out of Chaos came Darkness and black Night, and out of Night came Light and Day..."  It is not the order we'd put things in, but Hesiod's cosmus comes before any deities or heroes are named.  As I was taught, this is earlier than Genesis 1.  And Chaos should not be translated as "void" or "space" or "yawning gap" (ginnungagap is the Norse word).  The big lexicon, LSJ, itself refuses to further define Chaos, "the first state of the universe" (citing Hesiod, as above).  Chaos, undifferentiation, is prior to cosmus, order.  Now, that is tantamount (and in the 8th century BCE!), to Nothing (with the upper-case initial supplied by Krauss to make it clear).  It is as good as Odysseus making the befuddled Polyphemus think that he is Oudeis (Nobody).  Chaos does seem to be the Undifferentiated, so No-Thing.
Greek thought, even so early that abstract words have not yet evolved to meet the task, is from our earliest records cosmology and physics, not metaphysics.  Lawrence Krauss is up to his eyeballs in it, and, like the Greeks, he is highly verbal (not that he cites Hesiod!).
Working through Epicurus philologically will take me a bit more time, but I haven't forgotten it.
Credit
Though by now most of my thoughts or opinions are as mixed as my all-American genealogy, it is mete and right to say that my idea of Chaos came straight from one of my favorite professors, Joseph Fontenrose, at UC Berkeley.

Belfast on Antiques Roadshow

Harlan and Wolff, Titannic, Canberra, and Belfast

6 Jan 12  Buster's bath.  Only tangentially relevant.

One of our treats on Public Broadcasting is hours of the original Antiques Roadshow.  Occasionally, these are more than usually interesting.  Not that surprising remarks don't occur on the American one.  Once a representative of a big firm, such as Christie's, said of a wonderful little picture of a cat in that complicated pose, which Leonardo da Vinci himself drew (and I think it's in one of the notebooks at Windsor) that unfortunately most people would be offended by the cat's being shown washing more than its face, and so the picture would realize much less at auction.  But what is more admirable than an elderly cat that, rain or shine, keeps its white underside as white as an albino rabbit?  And the posture is one of the miracles of nature.  So when I came home Friday afternoon, and saw Buster at work, I grabbed the little camera; he was so industrious, and the sun was so low at 5 pm, that 1/25 second couldn't quite stop his action, since the wonderful little camera correctly read its object as needing f 4.8 for depth of field: Buster, my favorite model, was posing for Leonardo, no less.

Earlier this week, though, we had an hour of the UK Antiques Roadshow from Belfast, at the monument in the building site of the Titannic and her sisters.  To read even the Wikipedia article on the Titannic, you'd think that the iceberg, the loss of life, the passenger list, the lifeboats and all were the whole story.  This is to ignore the most important human and socio-economic side of this equivalent of an Empire State Building or, for that matter, a World Trade Center, though icebergs cannot be blamed of plotting.  As one after another showed memorabilia and recited recollections of their assorted relationships to Harland and Wolff, I realized that I had understood nothing much at all about the city of Belfast (and probably about Northern Ireland in general).  Here were the most modest and proud and devoted people you could ever dream of meeting and their sweet and unaffected children.  For almost my whole life I've known nothing, seen nothing of Belfast but the "troubles", which, of course, were all too real and tragic.  But here were men, women, and children quite unaffected in front of the camera and enjoying the occasion, too.  Their pride in shipbuilding was unforgettable, not least that of the gentleman whose pride was in Harlan and Wolff's last great ship, the Canberra, 1961 and not scrapped till 1997.  Shipbuilding is for Belfast what automobiles are to Detroit, steel to Pittsburg, filmmaking to Hollywood, but I have never seen a finer identification of a community and great industry than that evinced by the builders of the Titanic and their descendants.  They had given their all to shipbuilding.

And Buster, now somewhat arthritic, is unaffectedly doing what a clean animal ought to do.

I must go and see what the eleventh Britannica, 1910, for which I have three update volumes, has to say.

More Lucretiana

Scriptoria, Invocations, and a Philological Note

From Lorna Price, The Plan of St. Gall in Brief, an overview of the three volume work by Walter Horn & Ernest Born.  UC Univ Press, Berkeley, 1982.  Here I refer to the plan, whole, opposite p. 1, to the index drawing on pp. 10-11, to the reconstruction drawing on p. 29, showing the E end of the church amd the novitiate and infirmary complex, and the detail of the abbot's house on p. 40.  In the Index drawing, "a" marks the "Scriptorium below" and "Library above", tucked into the NE angle of the transept (in the SE angle is the Sacristy, below, and the Vestry, above).  The legends, the longer ones scanning, are in a fine Carolingian miniscule of their date, AD 820.

As you can learn on line, if you don't know, Fulda as you see it today is no longer the Carolingian monastery church that was indeed famous as a center of learning.  You can see original parts of the church of St. Michael, and the article from the Catholic Encyclopedia gives a good idea of how important Fulda was.  Based on archaeological studies over nearly two centuries, a reconstruction of the abbey church can be made.  But to get an idea of its place in the development of transalpine European architecture, it still is best to go to Kenneth Conant and Nicholas Pevsner, if English text is wanted.  And Greenblatt, in The Swerve, was wise not to insist that Poggio Bracciolini had to have found his manuscript of Lucretius at Fulda (the actually Carolingian Oblongus and Quadratus weren't known yet; modern texts rely heavily on them).  Yet, for all the reasons he gives, Fulda is not unlikely.

So the room where the monks sat to copy as well as the library space that housed Fulda's collection of manuscripts do not exist.  For that matter, if you go to St. Gall, the architecture you see is Baroque (and later in details), but the Abbey Library owns the plan made for the abbot of St. Gall, evidently (from the dedication on it) in AD 820.  We don't know if it was ever built in full this way, but it tells us more about Benedictine monastic organization and building north of the alps and the communal life lived in them than all the tomes of Mabillon. The scriptorium is labeled (and the sedilia are shown: see a on the Index drawing). It even tells us which buildings were provided with permanent privies, necessaria naturae, and how many posts were thought necessary in each outhouse (you can see those for the bloodletters' building, next to the infirmary, in the detail above at top left, and those for the abbot's mansio, at bottom left, by and large the same buildings that had rooms with a caminus (cheminée) built into a corner.

One of the great experiences of my student life was a seminar on the St. Gall plan under Prof. Walter Horn.  I happened to be the only member of that seminar with enough Latin to read and interpret all the legends on this tabletop-size vellum document (yes, made from three skins).  Everyone else had the task of enlightening me on the architecture.  I no longer have my card file of every single word on the plan.  On its web site, you can study and zoom and read everything for yourself, though I haven't found a list of the Latin yet.  If you can find Lorna Price's book, it is invaluable (though the legends are not given in full or in Latin).  The main point is that almost every novel or film or social studies textbook depends on the St. Gall plan for its evocation, if it has any substantial elements, of Benedictine monastic life, either from this plan or on the many studies, a few in English, many in German, based on it.  Monte Casino itself was less informative.  Notice the arcaded porticoes of the Abbot's house: at least this building had stone walls, as, of course, the church had, but Horn and Born are surely right that these monasteries had roofs steep enough to shed snow, and not tiled!
I do wish Greenblatt had shown the same familiarity with this material as Umberto Eco did in The Name of the Rose.
The example above suggests how the reading of Greenblatt's book is enhanced if one brings assorted bits of substantial knowledge to it.  It also helps to know at least a little Latin and Greek and to have read, probably in translation, the three evidently authentic Letters of Epicurus preserved by Diogenes Laertius.
First, though, concerning the Invocation to Venus.  I think that Greenblatt may make too much of its Venereal properties.  That is to say, any  long poem written in hexameters must have an invocation and it needn't be to the Muses as such.  If Epicurus had chosen hexameters, he'd have felt obliged to have one, too.  To address the force of Nature, of Physis, pervasive in everything (barring the atoms themselves), Nature which is generative and forcibly active in us all, is a sound Epicurean choice.  And an invocation must be to mythological entities (not to Poetic Inspriation but to Muses, for example), so to Venus rather than to Physis.   That is what Lucretius means by it, and he exploits it most gloriously for pages of poetry.  Why, in an Ode to St. Cecilia, for example, Nicholas Brady (co-author with Nahum Tate of a new singable translation of the Psalms, Tate who wrote the libretto for Purcell's Dido and Aeneas) for Purcell's 1692 Ode does invoke Cecilia, though in terms that do not stress her martyrdom, then provides Purcell and the audience with a virtual Middle Baroque Guide to the Orchestra, whose verses illustrate the virtues of each section of instruments, as if evoking the provinces of all the Greco-Roman pantheon, after hymning the Soul of the World.  That's just poetry, nothing to do with theology and not much to do with philosophy.  No more, I think, does Lucretius mean to worship Venus (rather, to reverence Nature profoundly and provide an appropriate opening to de Rerum Naturae).  But when "the jarring seeds of matter" kept singing in my head, recognizing the setting as just like that in the Frost Scene of King Arthur, I had to go and check on the Lucretian credentials of Nicholas Brady (which is fact are excellent).  Also, by the end of the 17th century, those "jarring atoms" were a common trope.  That is why I rather wish that Greenblatt had written one more chapter!  If you like Henry Purcell, as I do, you will love the 1692 "Ode for St. Cecilia's Day".
Back to Epicurus.  I had not read the only substantial surviving works, and I still have to find myself a good text of Diogenes Laertius, heaven help me (even for the 3rd century AC he is not the most inspiring writer).  But the Epistle to Herodotus is easily obtainable in Perseus, on line, even if you have trouble getting the Greek text there, and in The Epicurus Reader, inexpensive on Kindle.  Both of these include all the scholia (and distinguish them, too, from proper Epicurus); the Perseus** is the nicer translation, and the Reader doggedly excludes any Greek words, but the Kindle word-search comes up with all the swerve references.
Now, 'swerve' not only provides Greenblatt with his title.  It translates clinamen  (both the i and the a are 'long'), which proves to be a strictly Lucretian Latin word, though in its meaning plain as all the other -clin- stem words).  The dictionaries cite an "obsolete" Latin verb, *clinare, which per se does not occur in preserved texts.  Given that it is obviously cognate to Greek klino, one immediately suspects that Lucretius has done just what Cicero would have done: taken the Greek, formed from a Middle Voice participle, and used it, as we do such French as "de luxe" and "souvenir".  Consider, too, that LSJ (Liddell, Scott, and Jones, the big lexicon), in one of its citations uses the English swerve as a translation: eklínthê, he swerved.  We usually use that word for what an vehicle does to avoid hitting another vehicle, or a pothole.  As an absolute noun it is unusual, even rare, and poetic.  So clinamen would have seemed to Romans reading de Rerum Natura.  Besides, the Notes in the Kindle Epicurus Reader cite two studies on the Epicurean 'swerve', and by that name: "Epicurus on the Swerve and Voluntary Action," Atlanta, 1987, and H. Jones, "The Epicurean Tradition", London, 1989, AA Long.
** Under Epicurus in Perseus, the reference is D. L. 10.1, sections 55—83, where D.L. stands for Diogenes Laertius.
So my immediate suspicion that Greenblatt had not personally chosen 'swerve', though he made it his title, is borne out even by these elementary inquiries, and the range of translations for all the forms from klino in LSJ made clear why Lucretius had chosen clinamen (wherever it would scan) to explain why atoms in motion sometimes colliding and prior to space or distinguishable matter do account for...well, for everything.  And this is why the Church couldn't stomach Lucretius.  It isn't just that no gods are accessible (though their names can be invoked).  And, Lucretius got pretty nearly all of the Epicurean material from Epicurus himself.  Epicurus's dissolution of the soul at death is utterly antipathetic to any stretch of Christian philosophy.  The Church rather cherished the Stoics and certainly wallowed in neo-Platonism, but Epicurus and Lucretius are pure and serene atheism.  Like many moderns today, good Epicureans in antiquity could happily enjoy the art and architecture, the poetry and rhetoric of traditional religion (and they had no need for personal salvation), without believing in anything in them.  I mean, if Epicurus and Lucretius were alive today they'd be passionate about the Higgs boson.
It is more astonishing than I had ever dreamt: Epicurus realized that there was no beginning, because there was no 'what' to be a beginning of.  He had no mathematics relevant to the tasks at CERN.  He had no instruments to speak of.  He had a most remarkable human brain and in its exercise developed a most exceptional human mind.  Lucretius was his greatest disciple, evidently, and he barely escaped extinction; the two Carolingian Mss that we have seem to be the basis of the later medieval ones such as that found by Poggio Bracciolini.
To me, being able to read some of Epicurus and consider the questions in his language and the lack of mathematics beyond plane geometry, is profoundly reassuring; to be human surely is enough and more.
And the conscious mind is what makes one human.
I want to celebrate the New Year by making this post in time for it.  If I find more in further reading, I'll write another post.  For now, once again, I thank Stephen Greenblatt for his book and the Loeb library for endless good things and Perseus for surviving so many evolutions of formats.
And a Happy New Year to all readers.
CLINAMEN addendum
My excuse for fascination with the noun clinamen was its being the rarest, to my knowledge, of the “bare” neuter nouns formed on verb stems, that all are declined like nomen.  All are neuter 3^rd declension. “Bare” because there is no qualifying element and nothing to suggest agency: nomen barely names the ‘know’ stem.

I have never shed my adolescent pleasure in inflections and etymologies.  I suppose it is due to having begun Greek, Latin, and German at about the same time and in that order.

Later, in that St. Gall seminar, dealing with the hypercorrect spelling, toregma for toreuma, only cemented it.

How wonderful that Latin has the consistently adverbial ablative case to help make sense of Greek use of the remaining oblique cases, not least genitive ‘absolutes’.  That Greek has the middle voice of the verb to explain Latin deponents.  Not to mention each other’s sequences of moods / tenses.

Anyhow:

• clinamen, n. ‘swerve’ is perfect for Epicurean atoms (or sub-atomic particles, for that matter) that in their unqualified, undirected state of motion prior to time and space (and shape) may bump into one another, to be propped by one another, without any purpose or will or agency;

• flamen, n., cf. ‘blast’ as well as compounds like ‘inflate’ (unrelated in its stem to the masculine gender ‘flamen’ for a young priest), is the name for the motion of air;

• certamen, n. is the name, contest, for matching;

• flumen, n., memorized as meaning ‘river’, and, of course, the same as Italian fiume, is the name of streaming or (liquid) flowing.

Those are the ones that come to mind.  Like the stem verbs themselves they are intransitive, i.e., without agency.

The apparent Greek form from which the noun clinamen may derive (this is why I need to read the Epicurus epistles in Greek) is a Middle Voice participle, i.e., a verbal adjective of the Middle Voice of klinô, in Greek a very common noun both bare and in compounds.

I decided not to make this part of my Essay, proper, because my infatuation with the comparison of the bare bones of languages, at their most elementary, might not interest everyone.  But is it fatuus when it dawns on a young mind that the stuff in grammars is not the invention of schoolteachers or philologists but rather the natural science of language?