Reviews for Likenesses

The average rating for Likenesses based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2010-06-26 00:00:00 Linda Williams ALL MATTER? NEVER MIND! -Bertrand Russell's Grandmother (Mocking his Materialist Philosophy) When I was in my late teens I had a stunning Lucretian prise de conscience that utterly knocked the wind out of my youthful sails. It seemed the overwhelming answer to Eliot's "overwhelming question." Or was it really? Perhaps it is only the crass materialist's non-workable answer to life's big puzzle, I later reckoned, when my early Faith reappeared and took deep root - giving me a harbour of peaceful refuge from the materialists' amoral typhoon. When the eminent American philosopher George Santayana was a green undergrad he carried a copy of Lucretius everywhere he went... So go figure. I think back then, at the dawn of the Twentieth Century, it was probably the now conveniently forgotten Loeb Classical Library - English and Latin on facing pages - that he packed in his vest pocket (yes, even Freshmen wore suits to classes in those days). Santayana, like Bertrand Russell though, was a dyed-in-the-wool member of the New Freethinkers, which is where it was at in American and European colleges for this New Generation. Bright young things all, as Evelyn Waugh waspishly muttered at the time, a more wary undergrad himself. "All the Fun of the Fair!" Sam Beckett would later rejoinder. Gaudeamus igitur Juvenes dum sumus! So it goes... What this new Brains Trust - and their young confederates around the world - were about to do of course, was... throw out the Baby with the Bathwater. Totally Dis tradition and all its values: all the accumulated wisdom, mystery, legends, and profound insights of our classical cultural heritage - and pave the way to our Shining Instant Society, with all its myriad Instant Gratifications... and build a shining highway to the Total Devaluation of Mankind. And I, of course as an undergrad thought Santayana was so incisive - until I read the Lucretius bit - and only much later cottoned to his game... So I DID finally read Lucretius (and no, it wasn't this new jazzed-up translation). Yikes! Was this the Cult Classic of the great Santayana - who even had the apparent temerity to gush over the mystical chorus at the end of Faust at a much later time, not for its wisdom but for its metaphysics - this lengthy Latin lay written by a gregarious, morally bankrupt Roman Materialist? All this book does is sweep the table clean of the priceless family silverware and china plates - and replace it all with cheap plastic. Including the dying vision of that redeemed fallen hero Faust, the last great gasp of our forgotten all-encompassing worldview. Plastic? In exchange for that great Western vision? Welcome to the Real World of smoke and mirrors, kids! We grow too soon old... And too late smart. Well, all that took place starting a hundred years ago, way before we were born - and you know what? If this Roman dude who crowned Aphrodite as queen of the world could see all the hordes of stressed-out happy-camper Black Friday shoppers now, materialists just like him - He might finally see that on Aphrodite's well-rutted road his philosophy has now constructed a dead end - to block and alienate idealistic dreamers - in a soulless neon jungle. Built on the cracked foundation of a dead empire's empty materialism.

Review # 2 was written on 2017-06-06 00:00:00 Carolyn Shaw First, an apology for only giving it three stars. I am well aware that this is a brilliant piece of poetry, but my Latin is very poor, and I rapidly abandoned my initial plan of reading it in the original with the English translation alongside. In a way, though, I'm following Lucretius's advice: he explicitly says at one point that it's wrong to allow yourself to be swayed by beautiful words, and you should judge an idea on its merits. Reading him in my barbarian's tongue is certainly one way to do that. I have often debated the question of whether it is right to call atheism a religion, and with Lucretius it seems natural to argue that it is. The poem reminded me rather strongly of Dante - when I got to the bibliography, I was interested to see that Santayana had written a book comparing Lucretius, Dante and Goethe - but while Dante loves the One, Lucretius goes a step further and praises the Zero. His noble goal is to convince you that divine intervention is never required in order to explain what happens in the world, and that, if we just stop and and think carefully enough, we can liberate ourselves from irrational terror of the supernatural. Given that he's writing in the first century BC and science barely exists yet, this is ambitious indeed. But Lucretius has faith in his project; it's hard to avoid using the word. The rest of this review is available elsewhere (the location cannot be given for Goodreads policy reasons)