Miguel's Swerve Paragraph 9/27

Such was, in my case, the poem’s personal point of entry, the immediate source of its powerover me. But that power was not only a consequence of my peculiar life history. On the Nature ofThings struck me as an astonishingly convincing account of the way things actually are. To be sure, Ieasily grasped that many features of this ancient account now seem absurd. What else would weexpect? How accurate will our account of the universe seem two thousand years from now? Lucretius
believed that the sun circled around the earth, and he argued that the sun’s heat and size could hardly be much greater than are perceived by our senses. He thought that worms were spontaneously generated from the wet soil, explained lightning as seeds of fire expelled from hollow clouds, and pictured the earth as a menopausal mother exhausted by the effort of so much breeding. But at the core of the poem lay key principles of a modern understanding of the world.

In this paragraph, Greenblatt masterfully displays his thesis and his instantly earns the attention of his readers. He spends much of his paragraph showing why The Nature of Things is inaccurate, wrong, but then rebuts all that with one last powerful sentence. Also, he manages to explain a fairly complicated and sophisticated idea in an interesting and readable way. The absurd examples of Lucretius's misinformation provide humor and offset the very serious tone of the last paragraph about the author's  depressed mother. What otherwise could have been a very dull and drab segment of writing instead seems lively and upbeat, and encourages the reader to keep going. The last sentence pulls off a cliffhanger affect; the boldness and generalness of it creates a demand for evidence and a desire to keep reading. Greenblatt engineers an interesting, humorous paragraph that keeps the reader engaged and excited to read on.