What is food to one is to others bitter poison.–Lucretius, 50 BC
Titus Lucretius Carus (ca. 99 BCE – ca. 55 BCE) was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying the foundations of Epicureanism, De Rerum Natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or sometimes On the Nature of the Universe.
Click here to read “The Answer Man,” a critique by Stephen Greenblatt in The New Yorker.
On the Nature of Things
No single thing abides; but all things flow.
Fragment to fragment clings-the things thus grow
Until we know and name them. By degrees
They melt, and are no more the things we know.
Globed from the atoms falling slow or swift
I see the suns, I see the systems lift
Their forms; and even the systems and the suns
Shall go back slowly to the eternal drift.
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