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.
Greenblatt
in this paragraph, humanizes himself and creates an atmosphere in which the
reader may even feel sympathy for him. In doing so, he connects himself with
his work, but risks the reader believing his work is subjective. He articulates
the significance of On the Nature of Things by explaining its appeal. Its
significance makes sense. After years of hearing about his mother’s fear of
death and then finding a work that clearly articulates the point “Death is
nothing to us” is empowering. This piece of literature unchained him from the
ends that all mortals are bound.
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