'I Would Have Been Enchanted'

We think Titus Lucretius Carus died on this date, October 15, in 55 B.C. at roughly age forty-four. We know he wrote the philosophical poem De rerum natura, usually translated On the Nature of Things. Though read less often than other Roman poets, Lucretius can be traced in the work of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, George Santayana, Wallace Stevens and Guy Davenport. I’ve stumbled on him again while reading The Search for Roots: A Personal Anthology, ed b Primo Levi and published in Italy in 1981. The collection is an inspired hodgepodge Lev describes as “a harvesting, retrospectively and in good faith, which could bring to light the possible traces of what has been read on what has been written.” Included by Levi are selections from Sir William Bragg’s Lucretian-titled Concerning the Nature of Things (1925). In his introduction, the translator, Peter Forbes, writes: “It is Lucretius who provides the link between Levi’s scientific, moral and aesthetic…