He Shall be Compelled to Read....

 

    I started reading The Swerve over the weekend and I am really enjoying it. I have found it a much easier and palatable text than Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence. Greenblatt does a great job guiding the reader with him as he makes points about the past and takes those thoughts into present time. I like that we have Poggio as our guide as if we were there with him. Searching for these old manuscripts as he was, a book hunter of the humanities.
            
         As you may have come to know I am pretty into paintings and art history, throughout reading the first three chapters Greenblatt mentions some very important pieces of art work thats caught my attention. Particularly what stood out to me was his mention of The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, CA. This is one of my favorite museums and I have been over a dozen times even though the exhibits do not change very frequently. There was however an exhibit of Illuminated Manuscripts last Christmas that I drug my parents to go see them with me. The combination of text and the decoration of each letter and page have always draw me to these ancient pages. 

 These pictures can not even display the beauty of these buildings. It is standing alone on the top of a hill overlooking all of Los Angeles County. You walk up the white steps to the main entrance and from there you meander your way through room after room, going through different buildings just engrossed in the art.

  "In the 1980's, modern archeologists resumed serious work on the buried villa, (near Pompeii, after the eruption of Vesuvius) in hopes of gaining a better understanding of the whole style of life expressed in its design, a design vividly evoked in the architecture of the Getty Museum...where some of the statues and other treasures found at Herculaneum now reside" (63).
    The Getty's website says that the Villa of the Papyr was the inspiration for the design of the museum. This Villa is where parts of Lucretius's De rerum natura was found.

   
       Another part that stood out to me while reading was the huge importance placed on these manuscripts and the role the monasteries had in preserving and perpetuating these texts existence. I titled this blog "he shall be compelled to read" because Greenblatt states that as one of the rules for the monks. Because of the tremendous dedication of monks to reading and writing these texts have survived.

I guess on a simple level the journey to remote and far off monasteries is very intriguing to me, a sort of impossible task or a treasure hunt. Greenblatt writes in a way that makes me feel Poggio's excitement at discovering the manuscripts and the joy that was felt when the papyrus scrolls were found as the Villa of the Papry.

"What is not clear is whether [Poggio] had any intuition at all that he was releasing a book that would help in time to dismantle his entire world." (50)

"Lucretius had accomplished a near-perfect integration of intellectual distinction and aesthetic mastery." (51)

"...a single incandescent idea: that everything that has ever existed and everything that will ever exist is put together out of indestructible building blocks, irreducibly small in size, unimaginably vast in number...atoms" (73).

"atoms and void and nothing else" (75)

"What the Greek philosopher offered was not help in dying but help in living. Liberated from superstition, Epicurus taught, you would be free to pursue pleasure" (76).

     I was hesitant to start reading another text for fear of confusing myself. Lucretius seemed daunting and a bit too much to handle, but I am glad I have been able to just read Stevens poems and now take a guided tour with Greenblatt.