Jargogled Impressions.

As a kid, when I was taught world history, it was usually via an out pour of facts and figures and a record of times gone by. Instead of mythological stories that had elements of drama and thrill, these dry facts and figures – meant to be consumed in an academic capsule, meant little to me in my day to day life. Learning about the story of people and of events through the abstract humanization of “ages” was helpful though for purely memory-enhancing reasons but I paid scant attention to “why” these ages mattered or “what” came out of these defined phases of human evolution. From a nature perspective, these are less evolutionary stories and more an account of the briefest history of time that humans had a meaningful grasp of.

The concept of ages, or defined categorizations of specific blocks of time is a weird one. While ages are neat categorization tools for our fickle mind, they inevitably serve up hypothetical narratives of human progress and growth that bear little to no resemblance to how it really transpired. From cosmological (big bang, epochs), geological (pre-cambrian, phanerozoic, Cenozoic, quarternary), to anthropological (earlier apes to modern humans) and historical (ancient, middle ages, modern age), the categorizations come in various forms and sizes depending on how you want to organize the world around you. When it comes to human time periods (national, social, philosophical, cultural, scientific) though, the classifications span countries and cultures and are prone to broad generalizations on progress and growth of human thought. When I read about Renaissance as a kid, I had plugged this age into a neat period of human history when a lot of art and a lot of culture and a lot of science happened to entrance the world in its grip and we were bestowed with the edifying works of artists like Dante, Botticelli, Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci, etc. to the path breaking scientific discourses by Copernicus, Galileo Galilei, Kepler, and Francis Bacon.

But ideas and art didn’t just appear of its own volition in those ages. There’s a strange dance of ideas, of thoughts, of beliefs, and of passions that follows its own course towards manifesting itself into the mainstream of human society. Sometimes, these thoughts can jump and skip through generations and ages and find their way back into the collective consciousness through no discernible driver at all. As a kid, believing that the ages are these discrete pockets of activity was a helpful mental aid even though it bore no resemblance to reality. When it comes to Renaissance, that these renaissance men stood on the shoulders of giants – not from the preceding ages, but from the thinkers and philosophers of the classical era was lost to me.

This story of our journey from the classical age to the renaissance and how an unlikely book from an unassuming author redefined human growth is the subject of the book “The Swerve – How the World Became Modern” by Stephen Greenblatt. It’s the story of a trickle down of ideas and of “blasphemous” theories that survived the vagaries of time and decadence to inform a multitude of thinkers across centuries and brought about one of the most exciting periods of written history.

From Wikipedia: Chaos Theory is an interdisciplinary theory stating that within the apparent randomness of chaotic complex systems, there are underlying patterns, constant feedback loops, repetition, self-similarity, fractals, self-organization, and reliance on programming at the initial point known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions.

In Swerve, noted Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt pronounces the effect of swerve (ancient understanding of chaos theory) on how the world embraced modern ideas. Sprinkled across a quest for a lost book by ancient philosopher Lucretius, the author provides a syrupy take on how ideas formed, percolated, and morphed across generations against a constant backdrop of religious, social, and philosophical barriers.

Poggio Braccaliano is a book hunter born in the 14^th century dark ages of religious myopia and curtailed scientific horizon. As he embarks on, and subsequently succeeds at laying his hands on a long-lost tome “On the Nature of Things”, the world as it came to be, from the historic to middle ages, is laid bare by Greenblatt to provide a seductive glance at how the world functioned in those rudimentary times.

“The Swerve”, which Lucretius – a first century BC philosopher who wrote the book called variously “declinatio, inclination, or clinamen – is only the most minimal of motions, nec plus quam minimum. But it is enough to set off a ceaseless chain of collisions. Whatever exists in the universe exists because of these random collisions of minute particles”

From Epicurus to Lucretius to Lorenzo Valla to Thomas More to Giordano Bruno to Machiavelli to Copernicus to Descartes and Newton to Da Vinci and Botticelli to Spencer and Donne and Bacon and Yeats to Thomas Jefferson, the arc of thoughts and the germ of ideas trace its own path and destiny. Its these random collisions, and a seemingly haphazard release of intellectual forces that forms a major backdrop of the story that Greenblatt fuses in the book. While a major part of the book is dedicated to tracing the quest of the book hunter as, the vignettes sprinkled across the path, especially as it relates to the way things were and the way they evolved make for an interesting read. While not as intellectually stimulating as I would have hoped given the title of the book, Swerve served me a teaser for understanding the history of ideas and of the barriers that humans erected to a free circulation of these thoughts. The subsequent explosion of human endeavors during and post renaissance is an engrossing tale of inspiration and of the contagious nature of ideas.