All summer long I’ve had a deadline hanging ovet head—I was supposed to write an essay on a single word for an anthology. (Actually, the deadline has passed, and I’ve received a one-week extension!) I’ve been mulling over it for months. I’ve toyed with different favorite words—“loom,” “consider,” “shambles,” “aftermath” (it is partly the narrative of the etymology that interests me, as well as the sounds of the words themselves and their constellations of rhymes.) I’ve now signed on for “sagacious.” Maybe Ange’s senses' (sensational?) post will spur me to finish this damn thing!
I have spent some years translating Lucretius’ De rerum natura, a didactic poem about Epicurean philosophy in 7,400 lines of dactylic hexameter. Epicureanism is a materialist philosophy, all atoms drifting through the void according to the laws of Nature. The basis of knowledge therefore must also be physical—the senses. Pleasure—not overindulgence (which leads to, say, hangovers—bad), but the freedom to enjoy our physical existence without pain—is the ultimate good; fear of death, the root of all evil. The goal is "ataraxia"--unruffledness.
What is weird about it is that it is a Latin poem—even in the first century BC, prose, not verse, was the proper vehicle for philosophy and science, and Greek the proper language. Epicurus disapproved of poetry anyway, which was suspect for purveying all that nonsense about myths and the gods, and making it pretty to boot.
“Latinate” is a pejorative term among English writers, the suggestion being that Latin words are all multisyllabic abstraction, as opposed to good old concrete Anglo-Saxon lumps of monosyllables. There's something to that of course. But Latin itself is a very physical language—a language of things and deeds (not abstraction or philosophy), whose etymologies are firmly rooted in the Italian soil of agriculture and domestic tasks. (A “rival,” for instance, is someone you are bickering with over river water rights.) A Roman author who wanted to write about philosophy needed to either import terms from Greek or coin his own.
Thus it turns out that paradoxically Latin is ideal for getting across the visceral nature of Epicurean philosophy. Lucretius exploits Latin’s latent metaphors constantly (it is a theory of mine that poets are more—not less—literal-minded than other people); he makes its inherent concreteness into an asset rather than a drawback, and stubbornly avoids Greek terms except to convey that something is absurd, abstract, outlandish, or decadent. His genius is for illustrating difficult concepts with everyday, easily “grasped” examples—whether it be describing atoms moving through the void as dust motes dancing in a sun beam, or explaining how a limited range of atoms can form an infinite variety of structures by comparison with the alphabet’s ability to form all the words in the language. These are examples that have traveled well over the millennia and are accessible even to a schoolchild.
Sapientia, the rough Latin equivalent for philosophy and wisdom, comes from “sapio” (like "insipid")—to have a taste or to perceive a taste(“taste”—that word again!) In the latent metaphor of the word, then, knowledge enters the body through the senses, a key Epicurean concept. Lucretius is constantly urging his readers to follow their “sagacious” wits to the truth, like dogs hunting down quarry through the underbrush. “Sagax” means having a keen sense of smell, having a good nose for something, to be able to track something down. It is related to the English, “seek.”
I was startled when I discovered that our ability to
feel emotions evidently evolved from our sense of smell. What a thought! And yet, for all that smell and the emotions are so closely intertwined, how poor our language is in words describing smells. We have a wealth of words for sounds, for sight, for taste, but about the only olfactory-specific word I can think of seems to be “acrid.” Why is that, I wonder?
It all reminds me that the opposite of the aesthetic is not the ugly, which indeed impinges upon our senses in its own way, but the anesthetic.
Now off to finish my essay…
A.E. (Alicia) Stallings is the Oxford Professor of Poetry. She grew up in Decatur, Georgia, and studied…
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