Ice breaking up on the Connecticut River in Turners Falls, MA

Swerve.

I’m using the term in a specific way, borrowed from Stephen Greenblatt, who wrote a book called, predictably, “The Swerve”. It’s a favorite of mine, a double-helixed account of a treatise, “On the Nature of the Universe”, attributed to Lucretius and written in the first century BC, that represents the fullest articulation of Epicureanism, which originated a couple of hundred years earlier. The Epicureans believed in a world composed of atoms, a world of phenomena received and verified by the senses. As such, it posed a mortal danger to a world rooted in superstition and reliance on the mercy of the gods. When Christianity emerged, the early church recognized the threat that Epicureanism posed, and moved to suppress it. They were pretty effective: Lucretius’ treatise disappeared, only to be glimpsed in tantalizing references to it in other works. That’s the first helix of the story.

The second helix happens some fourteen hundred years later, at the advent of the Renaissance, when the suddenly unemployed secretary of a recently disgraced pope, Poggio Bracciolini, sets out on a quest to find ancient manuscripts in the monastery libraries of Europe. He stumbles upon an intact instance of Lucretius, recognizes it for what it is, surreptitiously copies it, and then disseminates it widely enough that it becomes an ur text of the Renaissance and beyond, even directly informing and influencing people like Alexander von Humboldt and Thomas Jefferson. Greenblatt argues that there are “swerves” in history, moments which change the course of everything (sort of like Marx’s “world historical figures”), and that Bracciolini’s rediscovery of Lucretius represented one of those swerves. He contends that Lucretius provided the first “modern” description of the world, a description that has, at least until the past few dark years, largely held sway. A world of observable phenomena, explainable and verifiable.

This, I freely and cheerfully admit, is an enormous, overblown tangent, right at the beginning of what I actually intended writing about, but so be it. So I’ll end this section by pointing out that the very name of my Substack, “Atoms and Void”, is lifted directly from a quote of Democritus (considered a granddaddy of the Epicureans): “By convention there is sweetness, by convention bitterness, by convention color, in reality only atoms and the void.” That’s pretty much how I see the world!

My own swerve, while perhaps not as historically significant as that explored by Greenblatt, has (potentially and hopefully) enormous personal implications: in the scant ten weeks since I last posted here, Duston (my wife) and I became aware of a house up in Massachusetts in which we saw huge potential. So we bought it! And we put our home of the last twenty-four years, our beautiful expansive rolling rustic compound, just north of New York City, on the market. It sold within days. And we packed up everything, we loaded up trucks with furniture and art and the stuff of our life, and we said our goodbyes and headed north.

Except we don’t get to move into the new house until the beginning of July, so we find ourselves in a prolonged bardo (to borrow the Buddhist term that George Saunders has recently popularized). This bardo finds its current form in my brother and sister-in-law’s beautiful mountaintop aerie, overlooking the Hudson Valley and beyond to the Catskills, one of the few 70-mile viewsheds in New York State. I’ve been watching storms roll in and out for the past few days (see the video above). It’s a remarkable place to find a perch, and we’re deeply fortunate.

Eleven weeks ago, had you described all of this to me, I’d have thought you insane. We weren’t actively looking to move anywhere, although we were (clearly!) open to the idea. Without quite realizing what we were doing (luckily!), we unleashed upon ourselves a frantic world of lawyers, realtors, inspectors, old-house experts, archaic knob-and-tube wiring naysayers, bumblebee murderers, well-chlorinators, brain-dead title deed extortionists, raging night terrors, rampant insomnia…

The new house is anything but: it was built in 1842, and if Herman Melville ever passed through Montague his eyes would surely have lit upon it, given that it’s on the main street of this tiny village (the idea that he might have verified its existence with his own eyes—in the Epicurean tradition—delights me inordinately given that for many years I’ve been a committed dickhead (of the Moby persuasion)). We’re moving far enough away to break New York’s magnetic spell, and into the orbit of the Amherst/Northampton university hub, with its rich intellectual, artistic and activist communities. We’re suddenly living within spitting distance (well almost) to two of our rambunctious grandsons, and their robustly individualistic parents (this is a high compliment, by the way!) We already have old friends in Montague, Northampton and Amherst, and my sense it that this whole area is filthy with the potential for new ones.

Community—everyone up there talks about Community. I just hope they let us in!