In the first book of his scientific-cum-philosophical poem ‘De rerum Natura’ — or ‘On the Nature of Things’ — Lucretius draws the reader’s attention to the power of invisible forces. The wild wind, he wrote,
whips the waves of the sea, capsizes huge ships, and sends the clouds scudding; sometimes it swoops and sweeps across the plains in tearing tornado, strewing them with great trees, and hammers the heights of the mountains with forest-spitting blasts.
It was a description I was well placed to appreciate as I read this whimsical, scholarly and original book while staying in a Georgian folly on a country estate in Kent. All around this mock gothic tower, in the words of Lucretius, ‘the frenzied fury of the wind’ shrieked, raged and menacingly murmured. Off the Welsh coast a ship sank and sailors drowned.
In the modern world the winds remain a formidable power.
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