the swerve

I finished the swerve last week. whoa. The book captured me. I finished it last week and quickly began reading solaris, which has me completely absorbed as well.  Now that i have some time, i thought id write a quick post about the book.

I didn't really know what to expect, i pretty much just picked it up and started to read. I didn't read the book jacket, know the focus of the book, or anything really. I dove in blind. After a couple chapters i couldn't put it down. Fortunately, i was reading the book on an ipad, and that made it easy to quickly look up words i didn't know and highlight to my hearts content and be able to flip through those specific spots i highlighted.

The history of the written word is complicated and I didn't  have the slightest idea the effort people went to preserve their written text. Poggio was quite the ambitious scribe to go to such effort to find ancient texts and preserve them. Reading the swerve made me realize how much i have taken for granted in reading the older texts i love so much. People went to such great effort and tedious labor to preserve these texts for future generations.

I really liked how greenblatt ended the book by tracing the "atoms of lucretius" in the declaration of independence. His summary of on the nature of things will be helpful when i begin to deconstruct the actual poem.

"The greatest obstacle to pleasure is not pain; it is delusion." There are a many connections we can make to stevens and this book, but ill stick with this one in particular. Humans are gripped by the illusion of the infinite, and it is the power of the imagination that encourages these illusions.