The 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. (4-5)

Greenblatt immediately lures the reader into his writing by sharing a piece of personal history about his mother. He explains that Lucretius' philosophy about death, and the fear of this inevitable consequence of life, was a complete revelation to him as someone who grew up with a mother who was constantly worrying about her own ending. On the Nature of Things helps Greenblatt realize that "to inflict this anxiety on others is manipulative and cruel," thus making his mother manipulative and cruel because her fear had a strong impact his childhood. By sharing his personal relationship with Lucretian philosophy with us, as the reader, we receive a different perspective on Lucretius' abstract ideas and also feel a stronger connection to Greenblatt, the narrator.