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By Root 916 0

the ancient soul from the nonsense that encumbered it before they came along. (Lucretius may have been mad, clinically mad, writing his De rerum natura, like Nietzsche, in the moments of remission between his attacks of insanity, but I still prefer this lunacy to the pre-Socratic theories on love and hatred, to which the four elements of Empedocles were thought to be dedicated!)

Nor do I deny—let’s leave nothing out—the positive role that a spiritual injection of a healthy dose of Epicureanism might have today in the face of the return we’re seeing to magical thinking, represented in the United States, for example, by a revival of so-called creationist theories or theories of an “intelligent design” and the incredible anti-Darwinian offensive described to me the other day by the essayist Adam Gopnik.

For the reasons I’ve just outlined, I find this doctrine terrifying, unbearable, and, for myself at least, unusable. And given my idea of what philosophy should be or, if you prefer, the use I make of it, that’s a crippling defect.

So, in return for your image, I’m going to propose another.

I’m not saying it’s any better or any truer (as if that were the question!).

It’s just that in Western tradition it’s the great alternative narrative to that of the Epicureans.

It’s the one that begins roughly with that other book that is the Bible, and in the Bible, Genesis.

And here, at the point in my reflections to which you led me with your sentence envisaging the stone tumbling into silence (!), its chief merit is that it fits in better with my experience, with the questions I ask and basically with my needs.

You know the story, don’t you?

It’s the story of chaos, or to speak like another writer, Rabelais, who knew his Bible well, of the original tohu and bohu in Genesis, within which a mass of whatever composition you like (the biblical text says “brownish soil” but in its place you could put stones, comet, gas, atoms, it doesn’t matter) will (1) form small piles, differentiated packages of distinct aggregates, in certain cases similar to idols or statues; (2) have each of its piles impregnated by a force that the text calls ruah, meaning both “divine breath” (escaping from the nostrils and injected into the nostrils of the inert statue) and “wind” (real wind, which devastates the land, raises seas, and falls in gusts and whirlwinds from the clouds); and (3) form, in this way, as many unique beings as there are breaths, as many individuals different from each other as there are meetings, instances of compenetration between the packages of earth and the ruah.

There too you have a tumult, a great scene, catastrophic and dizzying.

There too you start with a beautiful text, a very beautiful text, poetic in the way sacred texts are, and which masses of writers have been able to and will be able to make their own.

Since the ruah, the vital principle, is a material force, strictly material, not any sort of occult or spiritual thing, you do not abandon the healthy materialism that was the good side of your Epicureanism.

And finally, to the extent that the ruah comes from outside and is a breath breathed by the one you dare not name Yahweh, you retain the idea of life as a reprieve, something borrowed that you’ll have to return, so you can keep your hotel room. This has never been better expressed than by the Jew Luke, some thousands of years later, when he whispered to the dying, “Tonight, you’ll be asked to return your soul.”

Except that the biblical model contains a number of advantages that may seem insignificant to you but that I consider decisive.

The first is that chaos is not a void. It’s true that it’s another form of desolation, a state of the earth in which solitude, darkness, the abyss reign (Genesis 1:2). But to me that still seems less dizzying than your big bang.

The second advantage is that certainly the scene is terrible, endlessly bloody, with shadows and dust, underground monsters, snakes, curses, generation and thus corruption, abominations, floods, Gehenna, Sheol.* But all of that is less dark, less ballad