Greenblatt's Writing

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 orders his paragraphs and sentences with care to make them the most effective.  In the previous paragraphs, Greenblatt addresses his mother's fear of death.   It is not until this paragraph that he connects her fear back to On the Nature of Things.  Up until this point, reader is thinking 'where is this all going?' but he brings us back to the main subject with almost a conclusion paragraph on his mother.  He starts off the paragraph with a shocking sentence.  He points out that his mother did indeed live for a very long time, but then he addresses the tragedy of her long life.  She hardly lived a life because she spent so much of it worrying about the end.  He writes with almost sad frustration over the fact that she worried about death for so long and pushed that worry onto him for so long.  He captures a lot of emotion with this paragraph by connecting his interpretation of the book back to his life.