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.
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”?
ReplyDelete1. Two tamarin monkeys were stolen from the Dallas Zoo last week. The monkeys were recovered and a man was arrested, but police have declined to provide further information until the SWAT team returns with the missing leopard.
2. It is excellent advice to seize the day. When I was a kid, I thought it was “seize the carp”. There were no carp on the east coast, so I moved to Minnesota.
3. According to recent studies, 66% of the U.S. population gives serious study to the wisdom of seizing the day while 34% gives the wisdom of seizing the day piddling study.
In related studies, 66% of the population gives trifling study to the foolishness of seizing the day while 34% gives serious study to its foolishness.