These forms’ metamorphoses-and even their final breakdown and scattering in death-are not negations of who we are but our changing, miraculously reemerging expressions and fulfillments. It is possible, says Lucretius, to see yourself not as a single form that time whittles away at but as a series of forms that move through random cycles of incipience, shifting, and collapsing. Lucretius’s (and Epicurus’) insight is that another perspective exists from which our instability becomes a source of joy and wonder rather than of suffering. The restlessness of the particles we are made of seems to conflict with our deepest goals and to keep pushing us toward death as our bodily forms’ final failure. If we only consider who we are through this innate urge to preserve ourselves, we lock our lives in fear and suffering. It is this capacity for self-replenishment in the face of your continued fragmentation that Lucretius calls life. These movements eventually constellated into forms whose properties include the capacity to keep refueling and perpetuating themselves. Rather, that we see is the corollary of what were at first accidental atomic collisions. It is not that we have eyes because a higher power or a principle of harmony required us to see. No purpose-most emphatically, no anthropocentric purpose-is also inherent in the increasingly complex living things these atoms sometimes cluster into. There is no purpose to their motion beyond mere accident.

The Roman poet-philosopher’s basic premise in The Nature of Things, one he takes pains to derive from Epicurus and to distinguish from the claims of other pre-Socratics, is that the world is made of infinite space and of loosely moving tiny atoms that alternately bunch together and fly apart. It is also to make you love this fragmentation more than the hooks and walls you create to prevent yourself from spilling over your desired limits. Lucretius’s aim here is to make you feel your granularity and fragmentation. His lines’ caressing liquid consonants make this cluster of qualities seem self-evident. It is so dryly, lightly compact that it can be set in motion with a fingertip. Lucretius’s poppy seed is so smooth its rolling is a trickling. Downhill exactly the way that water will.

Epicurus on the nature of things