Carpe Diem Regained Read online

  Seizing the day can also become an elite pursuit, open to the privileged few who have the economic means for risky decisions and adventurous choices. When my father was an immigrant refugee from Poland to Australia after World War Two, struggling to make ends meet, carpe diem living was a luxury he could not afford: it was security and stability that mattered to him. We also see certain differences across cultures. Decades of survey data reveal, for instance, that Swedes, New Zealanders and Mexicans place more value on personal autonomy, and having the opportunity for self-expression and for making choices in their lives, than Bulgarians, Chinese and Moroccans, who show a greater preference for economic and physical security. Such differences are due to many factors, such as poverty and inequality levels, religion, and political ideologies.9

  And let’s face it, seizing the day might be just too overwhelming or exhausting to keep up all the time. We all need distractions – even trashy TV – to help us unwind after a frustrating day at work or to keep our minds off relationship worries. Procrastination has its virtues too, shielding us from unwise and impulsive decisions that could wreak havoc with our lives. Seize-the-day passion and intensity may need to be tempered with a quieter, less zealous approach to life. As T.S. Eliot wrote in his Four Quartets, ‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality.’

  Yet it was a yearning to engage with reality that originally sparked my desire to write this book. It all began after an epiphany on the stairs. I was going up to my attic study with a biography of the travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor, eager to dive into his spirited and daring life, which included walking across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul in the early 1930s. From the moment he set out, carrying a copy of Horace’s Odes in his pocket, he felt an intoxicating sense of freedom. ‘Living in a yeasty ferment of excitement,’ he wrote, ‘I grudged every second of sleep.’10 I too wanted a taste of that exuberant freedom in my mouth. Half-way up the stairs, I was stopped still by a cascade of questions that unexpectedly flooded my mind. Why was I so keen to read about his passionate, carpe diem life rather than live such a life for myself? Was my own life too full of vicarious, second-hand experiences? If seizing the day is so good for us, why don’t we do it more? In fact, what does it really mean? Of course, the irony hasn’t escaped me that I have opted to answer these questions about carpe diem – a subject that more than most should inspire us to action – by sitting in my study and writing a book on it.

  There was another underlying motive. Like most people, as I get older I can’t help but hear the clock ticking. My mind keeps returning to a single, stark question: How can I make the most of the time I’ve got left? I have no desire to live in the shadow of regret like Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich, who realised, on his deathbed, that he’d wasted his life on vain and superficial pursuits. Our lives are like that of the sparrow that the Venerable Bede wrote about in the eighth century, which flies momentarily through the hall of a great king on a stormy night:

  The sparrow, I say, flying in at one door, and immediately out another, whilst he is within, is safe from the wintry storm; but after a short space of fair weather, he immediately vanishes out of your sight, into the dark winter from which he had emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space, but of what went before, or what is to follow, we are utterly ignorant.11

  We are all sparrows, flitting into the warmth and light for an instant, then disappearing out into the darkness. In Bede’s account, a missionary concludes that we should therefore believe in God, to stave off the uncertainty. My own conclusion is that we should seize the day, spreading our wings in full flight in the fleeting moments that we have.

  I don’t believe there is any ultimate meaning of life, whether written in scripture, the stars or our DNA. If it is meaning we seek, we can – and must – create it for ourselves. As the psychiatrist R.D. Laing noted, ‘If there are no meanings, no values, no source of sustenance or help, then man, as creator, must invent, conjure up meanings and values, sustenance and succour out of nothing.’12 Ways to do this have emerged in all human societies, ranging from supporting a cause and following a religion to focusing on family relationships and striving to use our talents.

  But there is another approach whose possibilities remain untapped, and whose potential is fast disappearing: carpe diem. When we make a conscious choice to seize the day, even when our options are limited by circumstance, we are making a commitment to being active rather than passive beings, to pursuing our own path rather than one determined for us, to living in this moment rather than waiting for the next. And through that act of decision, we gain a sense of purpose by becoming the author of our own life. I choose, therefore I am.

  THE BIRTH OF CARPE DIEM

  The following pages will reveal the world of carpe diem in all its guises. We will delve into its various forms and the psychological barriers to practising them. We will come face to face with its hijackers, pinpoint its ethical weak spots, and ask whether it can be scaled up to become a force for social and political change. But there is something we must do first, to provide a foundation for everything that will follow: we must discover its backstory. Where and when was the idea born, and how did it develop its many personalities? The history of carpe diem begins quite simply: with a poem.

  Its author was Quintus Horatius Flaccus – better known to us today as Horace – a leading lyric poet during the reign of the Roman Emperor Augustus, who wrote it while living comfortably on his beloved farm in the Sabine hills near Rome in around 23 BCE. The poem, Ode XI, from his first book of Odes, is a mere eight lines long, yet the whole carpe diem culture industry can be traced back to it. From the Renaissance right through to the twentieth century, being able to quote even a few lines of it was considered a mark of good education for a budding European gentleman.13 Other writers both before and after Horace – such as the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus – may have tried to express the sentiment of seizing the day, but it was Horace’s phrase ‘carpe diem’ in the final line that captured the Western imagination.

  Reciting Latin verse is hardly fashionable today, but Ode XI is still a subject of hot dispute amongst literary scholars, generating more than its fair share of clever critiques and barbed comments in learned academic journals. Some of the debate revolves around matters that would only excite – or be understood by – devoted classicists, such as Horace’s use of the Greater Asclepiadean metre, the positioning of choriambic units and his radical introduction of the perfect subjunctive. But for the rest of us, the really crucial dispute is about interpreting what the famed Roman lyricist meant by ‘carpe diem’. To untangle the meaning, it’s worth looking at the poem as a whole. In this modern translation, which uses ‘harvest’ rather than ‘seize’ the day, Horace begins by addressing Leuconoe, a young woman – possibly a servant girl – in his company:

  Don’t you ask, Leuconoe – the gods do not wish it to be known –

  what end they have given to me or to you, and don’t meddle with

  Babylonian horoscopes. How much better to accept whatever comes,

  whether Jupiter gives us other winters or whether this is our last

  now wearying out the Tyrrhenian sea on the pumice stones

  opposing it. Be wise, strain the wine and cut back long hope

  into a small space. Even as we speak, envious time

  flies past. Harvest the day and leave as little as possible for tomorrow.14

  If you would like to impress your friends, you could learn the final two sentences in the original: Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.

  I have to admit to being a little disappointed when I first read Ode XI. It hardly seemed to have the uplifting effervescent quality that I associated with seizing the day. Still, given its iconic status in Western culture for so many centuries, it certainly deserves our attention. So what might Horace be trying to tell us?

  The most common way of reading this poem today is as a fervent call to grasp the fleeting opportunitie
s that life offers. Time is flying, so don’t wait for life to happen to you, get on with it now. Take some risks and do things you’ve never done before, because you only live once. ‘Leave as little as possible for tomorrow,’ Horace advises: don’t procrastinate, just do it. Sources ranging from newspapers and novels to memoirs and song lyrics reveal that this has been the most widespread interpretation of ‘carpe diem’ or ‘seize the day’ for at least the last 200 years. If you search through copies of The Times going back to the nineteenth century, you will find that three-quarters of the references to these phrases concern the idea of taking advantage of windows of opportunity.15

  This is certainly how carpe diem is understood in the film that has done more than any other to popularise it as a philosophy of living: Dead Poets Society. The late Robin Williams, playing the maverick English teacher John Keating at an elite boys’ boarding school in 1950s New England, explains its meaning to his young charges in a poetry class. ‘We are food for worms, lads,’ he tells them. ‘Because believe it or not, each and every one of us in this room is going to stop breathing, grow cold, and die.’ He then takes them to look at fading photos of former alumni:

  Did they wait until it was too late to make from their lives even one iota of what they were capable? Because you see, gentlemen, these boys are now fertilizing daffodils. But if you listen real close, you can hear them whisper their legacy to you…Carpe diem. Seize the day, boys, make your lives extraordinary.16

  A group of students then take carpe diem as their credo. It propels them to sneak out of school in the dead of night to chant poetry in a cave deep in the woods, and impels one of them to pluck up the courage to ask a girl on a date. But the feel-good, somewhat saccharine tone of the film is disrupted when one character, Neil, seizes the day by taking a part in a school play, in defiance of his overbearing father’s wishes. After his evening as Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the dream comes to an end. Neil’s father announces that he’s sending his son to a military academy, and that he will never act again. That night, Neil kills himself. Carpe diem has led to tragedy.

  Robin Williams as school teacher John Keating in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. The carpe diem theme was familiar to the actor: three years earlier he had played the lead role in a film adaptation of Saul Bellow’s 1956 novel Seize the Day.

  A very different view of Ode XI is to emphasise its sensual, hedonistic message. We should take the imperative ‘carpe’ to mean ‘enjoy’ the day. Clearly Horace is urging us to get ourselves merrily drunk (‘strain the wine’, sometimes translated as ‘pour the wine’), make love and enjoy the good times before our inevitable end.17 This perspective became particularly prevalent in the seventeenth century, when the ‘carpe diem poem’ emerged as a literary genre. Amongst the most renowned examples is Andrew Marvell’s ‘To His Coy Mistress’, an erotic rendering of Horace’s ode that celebrates the pleasures of the flesh (from a rather male perspective). With the prospect of ‘time’s winged chariot hurrying near’, the poet impatiently implores the lady, ‘And now, like amorous birds of prey,/Rather at once our time devour’ and ‘tear our pleasures with rough strife/Through the iron gates of life’.18 Hot stuff. Some modern commentators suggest that this is just what Horace wanted to convey. The poem, they say, is addressed directly to Leuconoe, a young girl who he is trying to seduce. She’s resisting his advances and he’s doing his very best to lure her into his bed chamber. Let’s stop wasting time by talking (‘even as we speak, envious time flies past’) and get on with it, right now.19

  No, no, no, respond others. Horace was not an advocate of hedonism but a critic of it. He was a believer in the Aristotelian middle way and his message is that we should live a life of moderation, quietly appreciating the beauties of nature and savouring the tastes of simple food and drink. Wasn’t it Horace who elsewhere commended ‘the virtues of plain living’? Instead of aggressively ‘seizing’ the day, we should gently ‘pluck’ it like the most delicate flower, and value each and every moment of our existence, no matter what life happens to throw at us (‘accept whatever comes’). Don’t fritter away your precious time speculating about the future. Instead, ‘cut back long hope into a small space’ and cultivate a sense of presence. Be here in the eternal now, in this day, rather than in any other. To really understand Horace’s poem, we should focus on the diem not the carpe.20

  This interpretation of carpe diem has become prominent in the media and public culture since the turn of the millennium, in large parts thanks to the mindfulness movement. Indeed, my research reveals that for around one-fifth of people today, carpe diem means immersing yourself in the present moment, as opposed to, say, seizing a window of opportunity.21 This is an historically unprecedented development: few people in the nineteenth century would have associated carpe diem with what the contemporary mindfulness expert Jon Kabat-Zinn calls ‘present-moment awareness’. Yet, as we will discover, this is precisely the kind of language with which it is now often described.

  Another popular approach has been to adopt carpe diem as a motto for more spontaneous living. This seems especially pertinent given that cultural historians such as Barbara Ehrenreich have identified a long-term decline of spontaneity in Western society. She argues that we may have been at our most spontaneous in the late Middle Ages, which was not simply a time of fear and misery, but also ‘one long outdoor party’ of raucous street carnivals, dancing, games and boozing interspersed with periods of hard labour.22 We began to lose touch with our spontaneity in large part due to the Protestant Reformation and the Industrial Revolution, which ushered in a more controlled approach to everyday life dominated by the tempo of the factory clock. Today it struggles to emerge in the face of digital information overload and an obsessive time-management culture that result in people tightly planning their schedules days and weeks in advance. We might strive to seize the day by discarding our timetables, and becoming experts at improvised, spur-of-the-moment living.

  A final strain of thought emerging from Ode XI concerns politics. Horace was not himself a highly political figure. Although holding a senior rank in the military and later becoming a supporter of Augustus’ regime, he generally stayed out of public affairs. So it may well be too much to advocate reading his poem as a political manifesto. But at least since the eighteenth century, the terms ‘carpe diem’, ‘seize the day’ and ‘seize the moment’ have been commonly used to refer to making the most of political openings or possibilities.23 In 1933, newspaper reports described the uncertain political situation in Spain as a chance for leftist forces to ‘seize the moment and start their own revolution’.24 When Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China in 1972, he declared that China and the United States should ‘Seize the hour! Seize the day!’, while Bill Clinton used ‘seize the day’ eleven times in public speeches on the final day of his 1996 campaign for re-election.25 When tens of thousands of Germans breached the Berlin Wall on the night of November 9th, 1989, it was widely described as one of the great seize-the-day moments of recent history. In 2011 Occupy Movement protesters in the British industrial city of Sheffield received a visit from an anarchist band whose radical songs might have sent a shiver down Horace’s conservative spine. The band’s name? Seize The Day.26

  Horace was a poet rather than a philosopher, more interested in aesthetic expression than presenting his ideas with analytical rigour and definitional precision. It may be unsurprising, then, that people have interpreted his poem in such different ways. Carpe diem clearly comes in many flavours, so if someone urges you to ‘seize the day’ you have good grounds for asking them exactly what they mean. Are they talking about grasping personal opportunities or enjoying hedonistic pleasures? Are they referring to presence, spontaneity or politics? In later chapters I will explore each of these five approaches, and how they offer different ways of confronting the shortness of life. But first I want to discuss what unites them: the fear of death. At the psychological root of carpe diem living is the knowledge that we are, as Mr Ke
ating (and also Shakespeare) put it, food for worms. While we expend much of our energy attempting to deny this reality, a taste of death on our lips may be just what we need to truly appreciate the wisdom of Horace’s ancient ideal and bring it into our lives.

  Notes

  1 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2651658/For-time-Britains-favourite-D-Day-runaway-Bernard-Jordan-tells-amazing-story.html

  2 http://forums.digitalspy.co.uk/showthread.php?t=2037992

  3 Thoreau 1986, 135.

  4 Special thanks to Dr Tim Smith-Laing for leading on this research, and also to Christopher Whalen, who made a significant contribution. The analysis focused primarily on English-language sources. The core data has been compiled in a Carpe Diem Database (Smith-Laing, Whalen and Krznaric 2015).

  5 http://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/divorce/bulletins/divorcesinenglandandwales/2013

  6 http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2449632/How-check-phone-The-average-person-does-110-times-DAY-6-seconds-evening.html

  7 http://brainblogger.com/2014/05/23/the-self-help-industry-helps-itself-to-billions-of-dollars/; https://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/dec/28/self-help-books-literature-publishers-growth

  8 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRX5MiOG420