The following was adapted from a speech delivered at the Frankfurt Book Fair in October.

Frankfurt, the financial hub of Europe, is home to one of the biggest stock exchanges in the world, where everything is about quick deals and quick money. It is home, too, to a book fair, which also happens to be one of the biggest in the world, and where everything, likewise, is about buying and selling, though the trade is in books—albeit only the newest ones, which appear in their hundreds of thousands each year. On the occasion of the fair, it is worth thinking about one of literature’s most important characteristics: its slowness.

I’m not thinking of how long it takes to read a book but of how long its effects can be felt, and of the strange phenomenon that even literature written in other times, on the basis of assumptions radically different to our own and, occasionally, hugely alien to us, can continue to speak to us—and, not only that, but can tell us something about who we are, something that we would not have seen otherwise, or would have seen differently.

Some sixty years before the birth of Christ, Lucretius wrote his only known work, “On the Nature of Things,” a didactic poem about how the world is made of atoms. The atomic reality that Lucretius describes is not an isolated phenomenon—it is not a separate realm of electrons and nuclei, electromagnetic fields, particles and waves. In Lucretius’ poem, the atomic dimension exists side by side with the world as we see it every day, with its grassy plains and rivers, its bridges and buildings, its cows and goats, its birds and its sky. Lucretius knew that the two domains are sides of the same coin, that the one does not exist without the other. There is little doubt in my mind that the world today would look different if the progress of science had been anchored in our human reality instead of losing sight of it, for in that recognition lies an obligation and an unceasing correction: we are no greater than the forest—we are no greater even than the tree. And we are made of the same constituents.

Lucretius’ poem was long forgotten. But when, eventually, it was rediscovered, in the early fifteenth century, it marked a significant prelude to the dawning Renaissance, and, not only may it still be read today—it continues to speak to us, telling us things we have forgotten, or things we perhaps never truly understood.

Literature works slowly not just in history but also in the individual reader. I remember the first time I read the Danish poet Inger Christensen and, in particular, her long poem “alphabet.” This was in the mid-nineties, some twenty-five years ago now. “alphabet” is a list of things occurring in the world; in Susanna Nied’s English translation, it begins like this:

apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries;

bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

cicadas exist; chicory, chromium,

citrus trees; cicadas exist;

cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

doves exist, dreamers, and dolls;

killers exist, and doves, and doves;

haze, dioxin, and days; days

exist, days and death; and poems

exist; poems, days, death

At the time, twenty-five years ago, I found this poem beautiful—there came from it a very special kind of existential glow. But it did no more than flame up for me in the moment. Then, a few years ago, it resurfaced in my mind. I don’t know why. But I read it again, and it had taken on new meaning. Firstly, I sensed a grief in its evocation of objects, animals and plants, as if somehow a shadow were now hanging over them. It could have been the knowledge that at some point we are to die and leave them behind, but it could also have been the knowledge that they might die and leave us behind. There are many animal species we no longer can take for granted.

Secondly, I was now aware of how the poem formally intertwines culture and nature. The entities listed in the poem do not occur randomly but are structured, in two ways—alphabetically, and according to the principles of the so-called Fibonacci sequence in mathematics, whereby each number is the sum of the two preceding ones: 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, and so on. This pattern occurs throughout the natural world, in the genealogy of bees, in the branching of trees and flowers, in petal numbers, pine cones, pineapples, and sunflowers. This underlying structure, to which nature itself is at once oblivious and obedient, belongs quite as much to mysticism as to mathematics. In the words that the poem isolates, calling forth their singular entities and phenomena, the world becomes at once familiar and alien to us, at once sensuous and abstract, comprehensible and incomprehensible at the same time.

Christensen is clearly related to Lucretius. The word that Lucretius used for “atom” is the same word he used for “letter of the alphabet.” This was also true of the first of the Greeks to write of the atom: they, too, employed the term for “letter of the alphabet.” Lucretius repeatedly compares atoms with letters; just as the same few letters may be combined in endless ways to express everything between heaven and earth, the same few atoms may be combined to create heaven and earth and everything in between.

Science and literature alike are readers of the world. And, sooner or later, both lead us to the unreadable, the boundary at which the unintelligible begins. In one of her essays, Inger Christensen writes that that boundary, between intelligible and unintelligible, exists within us; science, she writes, conducts the conversation between readability and unreadability using terms such as chaos theory, fractals, and superstrings only because to use the word “God” would seem overbearing.

Everything exists side by side. Atoms, letters of the alphabet, literature, science, the world. And insight and destruction.

The world in whose midst we now stand, with its skyscrapers and cars, its airports and its banks, also emerged slowly, and, if we were to pinpoint its beginnings, the great upheavals that occurred in Europe around the time of the rediscovery of Lucretius’ book would be key. The Italian scholar and humanist Poggio Bracciolini unearthed “On the Nature of Things” in January, 1417. He most likely found the book, perhaps the only copy then in existence, in the German monastery of Fulda, no more than a hundred kilometres from Frankfurt. Some thirty years later, around 1450, Gutenberg developed the printing press. That, too, happened in this region, in Mainz, only forty kilometres from here. Also around this time, the legend of Faust, the learned vagabond who sold his soul to the Devil, took shape in Germany. The roots of the Frankfurt Book Fair go back to that same period—the first one took place in 1454.