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| Lucretius George Barbier |
LUCRETIUS
Poet
by Marcel Schwob
Lucretius belonged to a great familylong retired from public life. Memories of his early days recall the dark porch of a house far up on a mountain, a bleak atrium and silent slaves. From childhood he heard nothing but scorn of politics and men. Memmius, a noble of his own age, played with him in the forest—played whatever games Lucretius commanded. Together they stood astonished before the gnarled faces of old trees or watched the leaves trem¬ bling in the sunlight—light vibrant and virile, strewn like a veil with dust of gold. Often they gazed on the striped backs of wild pigs rooting in the soil, and sometimes in their walks they met a murmurous swarm of bees or a caravan of marching ants. Emerging one day from a dense underbrush they found themselves in a clearing set all around with ancient oaks so nicely placed that the circle of their tops formed a pool of clear blue sky above. The tranquillity of this spot was infinite. They were, it seemed, in a wide path leading straight to the divine depths of the heavens. Lucretius was touched by the calm benediction of the spaces.
With Memmius he left the serene forest temple to study eloquence at Rome. Presenting Lucretius with a Greek professor, the old gentleman who ruled the house on the mountain told him not to return until he had acquired the art of scorning human actions. Lucretius never saw the old gentle¬ man again, for he died alone, cursing the tumult of society. When Lucretius came back to the empty house with its silent slaves and its bleak atrium, he brought an African woman, beautiful, barbarian, bad. Memmius was gone to the house of his fathers. Lucretius had seen enough of factions and party warfare and corruption. He was in love.
He led an enchanted life at first. Dark against the rich wall-hangings shone the glossy hair of his African, as she stretched her long body out on a low couch, holding up an amphorae of sparkling wine in her arms, arms heavy with translucent emeralds. She had a strange little gesture of trailing one finger across her brow, and her smiles were from a source as lost and obscure as the streams of her Africa. Instead of spinning wool, her fingers patiently picked it into little wisps that went sailing through the air around her.
Lucretius was filled with desire of her splendid body. He fondled her metallic breasts and he kissed the purple lips of her. Sighs and love words passed, making them laugh as they grew exhausted. They touched the filmy, opaque veil that sepa¬ rates all lovers, and their desire leaped until it reached that acute point whence it poured through and through their flesh without quite plumbing the depths. Then the strange heart of the African recoiled, while Lucretius grew desperate because he could not accomplish the profundity of love. The woman turned cold, bleak and silent like the atrium and the silent slaves, and Lucretius went away into his library.
There he unwound a scroll whereon some writer had copied the doctrines of Epicure.
Immediately he understood the infinity of earthly things and the futility of striving towards ideals. He compared the universe to those little wisps of wool the fingers of his African sent floating through the air around her. Hives of bees, colonies of ants and the shifting pattern of the forest leaves became only groups of atoms to him. In his own body he felt the invisible struggle between discordant people anxious to sepa¬ rate. Glances passing from eye to eye he thought of now as rays of some more subtle matter. What was the likeness of his beauiful barbarian but a mosaic agreeably colored? And the end of all this infinity he found sad and hopeless. Just as Roman factions warred with their armies and their criers, he saw turbulent masses of atoms dis¬ puting their obscure supremacy in the spilled blood of men. Death and dissolution, he saw, could only free these whirling masses to hurl them towards a thousand hopeless future struggles.
When Lucretius had been so instructed by the papyrus scroll with its Greek words interwoven one upon the other like worldly atoms, he left the bleak, lofty house of his ancestors and walked through the forest. He looked at the striped backs of the wild pigs forever nosing the earth. Emerging from a thick underbrush he came suddenly into that serene forest temple, then his eyes plunged up to the pool of blue sky and he rested.
From that point he regarded the swarmng immensity of the universe: all the stones, all the plants, the trees, the animals and the men; with their colors, their passions, their instruments and the histories of these many things, their births, their desires, their deaths. In the exact center of all that inev¬ itable and necessary death he saw clearly the death of his beautiful African—and he wept.
Tears, he knew, came from the action of certain small glands under the eyelids, agi¬ tated by a procession of atoms leaving the heart, while the heart itself had been struck by a series of colored images detaching themselves from the surface of a woman’s body. He knew that love was caused by a flood of atoms desiring to join themselves to other atoms. The sadness of death he knew to be the unsoundest of all earthly delusions, for the dead feel neither sorrow nor suffering, while he who mourns, mourns but his own end. He knew, too, that we are left no shade or ghost to shed tears on those bodies of ours stretched out at our ghostly feet. Knowing as he did, the empty vanity of sorrow, love and death compared to those calm spaces in which we exist, he continued to weep and to desire love and fear death.
That is why he returned to the bleak house of his ancestors, seeking the beautiful African, whom he found brewing something in a caldron over a fire. She, too, had been thinking, though her thoughts were as mysterious as the source of her smiles. Lucretius looked down into the bubbling brew as it cleared slowly, like a green and stormy sky. The woman trailed one finger gently over her forehead when she handed him the cup. Lucretius drank and his reason left him as quickly, so that he forgot all the Greek words from the papyrus scroll. Then, being mad, he learned real love for the first time, and in the night, being poisoned, he learned death.
Imaginaries Lives
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