6 Feb 2023 – Theme: Time and Carpe Diem Other Poets

And Now for Something Completely Different . . .

...as John Cleese announced in “Monty Python’s Flying Circus!” The new and different is a new theme: “Time – Carpe Diem.” But first, a quick look back. Yep! In last week’s post we noted that something different was coming. Specifically, last week announced the end of the series titled “Winter: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly.” Two of our favorite readers both misinterpreted the announcement and berated me for incorrectly saying that Winter was over. They went on to give details of their ongoing Winter chores, critters visiting yards, and stories of weather-related incidents. Anyway, the Winter theme is now complete, finished, kaput. That would be the series, not the season.

Thanks to all readers who commented on the Winter posts. Now for the completely different something: the next theme – TIME, also known as Carpe Diem! This week we begin with published poems on the subject by several poets – some famous, some infamous, and some unknown to most readers.

"We are food for worms, lads," announces John Keating, brought to cinema life by Robin Williams as the counter-culture English teacher in Dead Poets Society (1989). "Believe it or not," he continues, "each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die."

This announcement comes like a thunderbolt epiphany to the boys, and their much-shouted mantra becomes, “Carpe Diem,” translated here as “seize the day.” Why so much vim and vigor? Time. Time passing. Unlike other creatures (as far as we know), we have at least a dim notion that we will end. We can see coffins with corpses, graveyards, and hospitals brimming with the sick and injured. Still, the idea of our individual death seems in bad taste, even ridiculous. The end of our time is not so nigh, we believe. 

Even if the “end” is not near, there are all those present moments, ticking off, one after another, that congeal and conjure our experiences and thus our lives. Seize the day. Make hay while the sun shines. Live for today. Take no thought for tomorrow. Eat dessert first. You know all the quips. When you hear them, you know what they mean; however, how many times do we act on their messages? 

It can wait until tomorrow. When I retire . . . I just have to finish . . . and so on and so on.

Robert Herrick (1591 – 1674) offered advice to virgins, and certainly virgins are a class that better hurry up or . . . fill in the blank. In Herrick’s To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, he wastes no time admonishing them and the rest of us to live according to the ephemeral nature of life. So, here it is:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

   Old Time is still a-flying;

And this same flower that smiles today

   Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun,

   The higher he's a-getting,

The sooner will his race be run,

   And nearer he's to setting.

That age is best which is the first,

   When youth and blood are warmer;

But being spent, the worse, and worst

   Times still succeed the former.

Then be not coy, but use your time,

   And while ye may, go marry;

For having lost but once your prime,

   You may forever tarry.

~~~~~~~~~~~~

The First Person Who Will Live to Be One Hundred and Fifty Years Old Has Already Been Born

Nicole Sealey

[For Petra]

Scientists say the average human

life gets three months longer every year.

By this math, death will be optional. Like a tie

or dessert or suffering. My mother asks

whether I’d want to live forever.

“I’d get bored,” I tell her. “But,” she says,

“there’s so much to do,” meaning

she believes there’s much she hasn’t done.

Thirty years ago she was the age I am now

but, unlike me, too industrious to think about

birds disappeared by rain. If only we had more

time or enough money to be kept on ice

until such a time science could bring us back.

Of late my mother has begun to think life

short-lived. I’m too young to convince her

otherwise. The one and only occasion

I was in the same room as the Mona Lisa,

it was encased in glass behind what I imagine

were velvet ropes. There’s far less between

ourselves and oblivion—skin that often defeats

its very purpose. Or maybe its purpose

isn’t protection at all, but rather to provide

a place, similar to a doctor’s waiting room,

in which to sit until our names are called.

Hold your questions until the end.

Mother, measure my wide-open arms—

we still have this much time to kill.

Individual sentient beings die. Anything that lives arrives and departs according to the great matters of life and death. We may consider our own death from time to time, more so when we or ill or when someone close to us is making the transition to whatever comes after this. However, how often do we stop to think that each of us to greater or lesser extent are eking the life out of the very place we walk upon. We are killing the only creation that keeps us alive – that we ever came into existence at all.

This Beautiful Planet

By Dorothea Lasky 

Please tell me that I was a good child

And that I did everything right

And that the atmosphere was exactly certain

I want you to love me

In ways that you never have

So that I become a forgotten world

With rainbow sunrises over dark green trees

And the cooling of the day

Becomes normal again

We will sit and watch the body of water

That we once called a sort of death

You know even in my dreams

You say I’ll never get it right

This is not a dream

We are burning here with no escape

But no matter how many times

They talk about the moon

It does not take a poet

To know that the moon

Is still only an illusion

Only an illusion

The moon calls out to all of us

Come back, it says

But we don’t hear it

Already on our way

To somewhere

A word from the poet about the poem above . . .

“I’ve long been obsessed with the idea that our human experience is very unimportant when taken in the context of the endless magnitude of the universe. It’s both a comforting and terrifying reality. In terms of this poem, this reality is manifest in my current fear for our planet. Climate change dominates my thoughts most days. In many ways, this poem is a narration of this particular sort of existential anxiety. It is only through love and care of others that we can still have hope for our beautiful planet."

Czeslaw Milosz asserts that the world has not yet ended, though "No one believes it is happening now,"

A Song on the End of the World

Czeslaw Milosz – 1911-2004

On the day the world ends

A bee circles a clover,

A fisherman mends a glimmering net.

Happy porpoises jump in the sea,

By the rainspout young sparrows are playing

And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends

Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,

A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,

Vegetable peddlers shout in the street

And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,

The voice of a violin lasts in the air

And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder

Are disappointed.

And those who expected signs and archangels' trumps

Do not believe it is happening now.

As long as the sun and the moon are above,

As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,

As long as rosy infants are born

No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet

Yet is not a prophet, for he's much too busy,

Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:

No other end of the world will there be,

No other end of the world will there be.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Finally, we hear from the English master once more. Where did all his wisdom come from. A bit scary, eh?

As You Like It, Act II, Scene VII [All the world's a stage]

William Shakespeare 1564-1616

Jaques to Duke Senior

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Background

The Latin phrase carpe diem originated in the "Odes," a long series of poems composed by the Roman poet, Horace, in 65 B.C.E., in which he writes:

Scale back your long hopes

to a short period. While we

speak, time is envious and

is running away from us.

Seize the day, trusting

little in the future.

Exploration 1: Can you name the itsy-bitsy primates featured in this post, and why they were in the news this past week?

Exploration 2: Carpe Diem advises us to live well (whatever that means to each of us) every moment because any time the moments will come to an end. Is this good advice? Advantages and disadvantages?

Exploration 3: What do you think the per cent of the U.S. population might be that gives serious thought to the wisdom (or foolishness) of “carpe diem”?

 

Who's the monkey?