Stephen Greenblatt Gets His Swerve On

When Stephen Greenblatt, the eminent Renaissance scholar and Harvard professor of English, titled his new book The Swerve, it’s a safe bet that he wasn’t thinking about the current slang meaning of the word, which according to Urban Dictionary is “used most often as a sexual reference,” as in “get your swerve on.” The swerve Greenblatt has in mind, rather, is the abrupt, unpredictable movement of atoms that, according to the ancient Roman poet Lucretius, makes possible the creation and destruction of everything in the universe. “The swerve—which Lucretius called declinatio, inclinatio, or clinamen—is only the most minimal of motions,” Greenblatt explains. “But it is enough to set off a ceaseless chain of collisions. Whatever exists in the universe exists because of these random collisions of minute particles.”