Swerve: Preface

"As it turned out, my mother lived to a month shy of her ninetieth birthday. She was still only in her fifties when I encountered On the Nature of Things for the first time. By then my dread of her dying had become entwined with a painful perception that she had blighted much of her life—and cast a shadow on my own—in the service of her obsessive fear. Lucretius' words therefore rang out with a terrible clarity: "Death is nothing to us." To spend your existence in the grip of anxiety about death, he wrote, is mere folly. It is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed. He gave voice as well to a thought I had not yet quite allowed myself, even inwardly, to articulate: to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel."

          This short excerpt is from Stephen Greenblatt preface in his book, "Swerve." His writing style is smart, because he opens up about his personal history, allowing the reader to both relate to him, and trust his writing. When Greenblatt refers to his mother as being afraid of dying every day, he does not exactly mean that she lived life to the fullest, like every day would be her last. Instead, she had her son and live in fear with herself for his entire childhood. During this preface, Stephen Greenblatt is not trying to make the reader connect with his writing, he is trying to make the reader connect with his own connections, like when he mentions the line by Lucretius, "death is nothing to us." His mother had them live their lives in fear of death, which Lucretius states as, "mere folly," and that "it is a sure way to let your life slip from you incomplete and unenjoyed." This is essentially the way that Greenblatt feels about his life, and looking back on it, both he and his mother realize that living their lives in fear was a mistake, and that "death is nothing."