Lucretius to Milton to Pullman

Into this wild abyss
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight ,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked awhile
Pondering his voyage
                 Paradise Lost~Milton

While we were talking about the Lucretian sublime (the immutable particles, the finite amount of time we have to live and appreciate song and art, and the void), I couldn't help thinking about Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy and how Mr. Pullman is a Lucretius "swerve" kind of guy.

The books revolve around Dust, "elementary, charged particles," which are the keys to conscious thought.  Like the "bucks" and the "jar," they are imagination or they are the atoms, which make humans. . .I guess human.  People die and turn back to Dust (particles).  An afterlife isn't life, it is prolonged dying, which is Lucretius- there is no existence from death onward.

Out of curiosity, I typed in "pullman" and "lucretian sublime" into google and got Harold Bloom's The Anatomy of Influence. This wasn't the book I picked, but the google books excerpt led me to the Milton passage above, which is at the beginning of Pullman's Amber Spyglass. This surprised me a little, because Milton was a Christian dude; but Bloom says that his choice of "atheist Lucretius as a guide to the abyss suggestive."  (I might be paraphrasing there). He doesn't really elaborate clearly there, but I think he's moving towards the idea that poetry is not religious or more specifically, Christian, because it cannot "believe" in anything. Bloom says Milton's poetry is "passionate, sensuous and simple," which falls in line with the Lucretius idea of living life fully, which kind of takes me back to Pullman.

"He meant the Kingdom was over, the Kingdom of Heaven, it was all finished.  We shouldn't live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place."

It's not perfect, but there are plenty of connections. If Pullman's books were allowed anywhere near high school classrooms, I think it'd be possible for kids to even get it a little.