Very Good New Yorker Articles

by Stephen Greenblatt, a pre-eminent Shakespeare scholar and general editor of the The Norton Shakespeare. This is on his reading of The Nature of Things by Lucretius, which I read for a Latin Lit in Translation course in college. I of course never got nearly as much out of it as he does. He writes at one point how his mother obsessed about her own death and would frequently tell him that he might not see her again when he went off to school. This passage from Lucretius is especially profound.

 
The other article I like from this week's is

A Critic at Large

Is That All There Is?

Secularism and its discontents.

by James Wood August 15, 2011

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2011/08/15/110815crat_atlarge_wood#ixzz1VDRIQR70

I have a friend, an analytic philosopher and convinced atheist, who told me that she sometimes wakes in the middle of the night, anxiously turning over a series of ultimate questions: “How can it be that this world is the result of an accidental big bang? How could there be no design, no metaphysical purpose? Can it be that every life—beginning with my own, my husband’s, my child’s, and spreading outward—is cosmically irrelevant?” In the current intellectual climate, atheists are not supposed to have such thoughts. We are locked into our rival certainties—religiosity on one side, secularism on the other—and to confess to weakness on this order is like a registered Democrat wondering if she is really a Republican, or vice versa.