Lucretius | Thornfield Hall

So I’m 23 years old, and I’m trying not to drop my teacup, because the professor’s wife might come home, and how to explain our illicit tea-drinking club? I was a nubile blonde back then, no, a nervous nubile blonde, he said fondly, and despite our difference in status, we enjoyed our Lucretius-translating tea parties.

For the first time, atoms were clicking around in my head. Lucretius adored atoms, and I began to understand physics. Incredible, isn’t it? what poetry and Epicurean philosophy can teach you.

The prof always offers milk and sugar.

“No, thanks,” I say. I can balance a cup of tea on the saucer, but not the spoon.

He and I were sort of friends, sort of buddies, really. We talked in the conference room about what novels we were reading until an irate professor ordered us to go to the lounge so he “could think.” My laid-back prof recommended Rosellen Brown and Barbara Pym, while I urged him to try Ruth Prawer Jhabvala and Andre Dubus.

Reading was our passion: that was our bond. While waiting at the reserve desk for the return of a scholarly journal on reserve at the library, I devoured the short stories of Raymond Carver and John Updike in The New Yorker. The library inevitably had only one copy of the journal with the assigned article, so I sometimes had to read the entire New Yorker.

But the Lucretius club was the highlight of the semester. Our bubbly casual chats about philosophy, broken up occasionally by literary analysis, bridged the gap between student and professor. In retrospect, he was a charming older man, though I took his charm entirely for granted. When you’re young, everyone is charming to you, because you see the world more kindly.

The memory of those rattling china tea cups remind me of Lucretius and his atoms. I drink tea in mugs these days – they’re more stable, and hold more tea – but I might take out the old china in homage to this long-dead brilliant professor.

Was 2024 a good reading year?

Every year is a good reading year because I am picky-picky-picky. I don’t finish a book unless it is (a) fascinating, (b) well-written, and (c) works some kind of spell on me. You know, Girls just want to have fun! But we also are earnest. I don’t care if it is the Book of the Year, I don’t care if if it wins every award, I’m blasé about reviews in the mainstream presses – but I seem to be able to pick the books that are right for me.

Every century is different. The twentieth century was different. So many voices and styles characterize an era. One minute you’re enchanted by Jean Stafford’s Pulitzer Prize winning short stories, next you’re reading Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Booker Prize-winning Heat and Dust, then you’re taking a break with Sue Grafton’s mysteries, then you are lost in Frank Herbert’s Dune, and then you discover the brilliant Margaret Drabble.

The New Yorker had a great influence on everybody. We were mad about the minimalist stories of Raymond Carver. And I remember going to bookstores all over town to find Bobbie Ann Mason’s books, though it might have been Harper’s or The Atlantic that drove me.

So why have I returned to the classics and the dead? It is partly due to a long illness. Once, when I was extremely ill in the hospital, I finally recovered enough to read a little. I chose Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Yes, I realized what I needed was the highest quality. And the doctor decided I was ready to leave the hospital when he found me reading Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things). The doctor loved foreign languages and was impressed to meet a soulmate. The nurses informed me he knew eight languages.

Perhaps Jane Austen and Lucretius kept me alive. (Well, there was also medicine.) But there is no doubting the magic of literature. Fate brought these books to me when I needed them most.