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Ceasing to Be
The idea is simple. Lucretius wanted to rid
the world of death fear by writing
On the Nature of Things. He says we fear
death only believing the mind somehow
continues even after the skull that holds it
is broken and harmless vapor leaks out
into everything dissolving. It's
true I fear my death, but I fear
the death of others more, because that's
a death without death through which
I must live. Or I fear my death
for the death others will have to live through
without me. That and probably pain
are why people are afraid. Anyway a world
without death fear would be even more scary.
Not that it matters. Death and fear. One
hand of steel, one of gold. Even you
wouldn't know which to cut off or reach
out for first Lucretius, because it is always
very dark here in the future.
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Matthew Zapruder is the author most recently of Father’s Day and Why Poetry. He is editor at large at Wave Books, and teaches in the MFA in creative writing at Saint Mary’s College of California. [For more poems by, and information on, Matthew Zapruder, click this link.]
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Botticelli’s Primavera (Spring), 1482. Lucretius’ “De rerum natura” (On the Nature of Things) is a first-century BC didactic poem by the Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius (c. 99 BC – c. 55 BC), whose goal was to explain Epicurean philosophy to a Roman audience. The work begins with a tribute to Venus (at the center of this painting), but very quickly shifts its focus to the philosopher Epicurus.
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