5.13 Carpe All Over the Place

Diems Smothered in Carpes

There is a season for everything, and we do not notice a given phenomenon except at that season, if, indeed, it can be called the same phenomenon at any other season. There is a time to watch the ripples on Ripple Lake, to look for arrowheads, to study the rocks and lichens, a time to walk on sandy deserts; and the observer of nature must improve these seasons as much as the farmer his. So boys fly kites and play ball or hawkie at particular times all over the State. A wise man will know what game to play to-day, and play it. We must not be governed by rigid rules, as by the almanac, but let the season rule us. The moods and thoughts of man are revolving just as steadily and incessantly as nature’s. Nothing must be postponed. Take time by the forelock. Now or never! You must live in the present, launch yourself on every wave, find your eternity in each moment. Fools stand on their island opportunities and look toward another land. There is no other land; there is no other life but this, or the like of this. Where the good husbandman is, there is the good soil. Take any other course, and life will be a succession of regrets. Let us see vessels sailing prosperously before the wind, and not simply stranded barks. There is no world for the penitent and regretful.

— Henry David Thoreau, Journal, 1859

Yeah? Well, I have some questions for you, Henry. Not all of us can sit unwashed in a little cabin in the big woods and reflect on end: it’s getting harder to find places where I don’t get a cell signal, anyway. Besides, rumor has it that you went back into town often enough, and spent a fair amount of time there yelling at passers-by and being a general misanthrope and nuisance. 

Since we talked last week, I’ve been inundated with emails–special discounts and once-in-a-lifetime offers–I’ve been told that I need to work out more, enjoy food more, plan for my estate, to catch up on three Netflix series before the new ones premiere soon, that if I had the right scheduler, I could accomplish more each day, and that if I redesigned my social media, I’d get more ROI in my CRM.

Seize the Day, right?

Nearly 200 musical groups have used the phrase in their songs, from Flogging Molly to Disney to Kendrik Lamar (um, Drake said “Seize the Moment” instead).  But the number of companies and business programs and spiritualist movements which have adopted the phrase if not the philosophy is uncountable. 

And us? Well, we’ve dug into and touched upon everything from ancient Roman poetry to metaphysical seductions and from a favorite poem of British stoicism to Victorian horror and Star Trek fanfiction. And am I any further along than I was before?

Um, yeah. That wasn’t a rhetorical question: we’ve learned quite a bit. But what we haven’t done, not nearly enough, is figure out what to do with all these fancy themes. We’ve been carrying them around, asking questions, and I’ll bet a lot of us are wondering: so, when do we reach the conclusion? The neat and tidy ending which tells us what to do next?

And if so, you’d be forgetting what we talked about with Uncertainty! You remember now: that part of our challenge is in holding ourselves accountable to our interpretations, but that some interpretations (probably most) leave us with ambiguity, interpretative vertigo, always spinning off additional questions. And that often, when we engage in conversations, the act of the conversation is more important even than our coming to certain conclusions from it. Even choosing what we read carries a degree of uncertainty.

But that’s why we’re here today. We’ve looked at several writers who’ve explored the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More approach, some (*cough* Andy Marvell*) who have abused it more than a little. And still, it’s clear that we’ve barely scratched the surface of it all. And our literary calendar is ticking away, so we have to make some choices at some point, right?

So today I want to sort through our notes a bit, throw some rocks at our culture for fun but no profit, and see if anything at all is left standing by the time we’re done. 

And we have to, I think, because right now we have so many trails and choices for our path ahead that I can’t see clearly which we should pursue. Let’s eliminate a few. And, by the way, can I ask, while I’m deleting emails here, if it’s just bad form for the AARP to keep sending offers for a European river cruise with the Subject Line: “last chance”?

Theme

This is Literary Nomads, where we wander through literature and language, near and far.

I’m Steve Chisnell, and today we’re taking the Red Pill to relieve some mortal anxiety..

Recap: Seize the Day, We Barely Knew You

Now, if you’re just joining the podcast, we’re nearing the end of a long look at Andrew Marvell’s “To His Coy Mistress” and everything that followed from that, most specifically a few questions related to our own mortality and how to live our lives. We’ve been talking about the concept of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More through the ages, this “Seize the Day” idea of forceful action now, leaving nothing for tomorrow. 

“The Latin term for that sentiment is carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More. Seize the Day!”

(Yes, yes, Peter, that thing. That’s quite enough now.)

Unfortunately, people like Andrew Marvell and Peter Keating, I think, have given carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More a popular spin that hasn’t done any of us any favors. We say it now (or just wear a button or something) and believe we’ve engaged in some deep philosophy. The thing is, as we’ve been learning, there are many versions of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More, so many now that it’s hard to have a conversation about it without misunderstandings. 

But at the heart of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More are several key questions: what do we understand about the nature of time? What choices should we make with the time we have? How do we respond to impending mortality? And how do these answers lead us to a life that is satisfying and meaningful? (You’ll notice that I did not here say “happy,” and we’ll soon enough get to why.)

What we’ve learned, too, is that carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More doesn’t really mean “seize the day” at all, and that translating it this way has historically created a kind of forceful taking, a machismo of aggressiveness, even potential violence, when it is manifested for our selfish interests: against those with less power, against women in the case of Andrew Marvell, the Cavalier poets of the 17th century’s carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More mania, even the Roman poet Horace, and–as we’ll see today by who gets the rocks thrown at them–a host of other popular misuses. 

So we need to start, you and I, by agreeing together to translate carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More correctly when we refer to it as any kind of Classical Age philosophy. In the episode on Horace two weeks ago, we identified that translation as “pluck,” “gather,” or “harvest” the day, as it first appears in a poem full of agricultural metaphors and comes from the Greek carpos for “fruit”; more, the Latin word for “seize” is more akin to “rape” than it is anything else. 

We can see the sexualized and even assaultive versions of seize the day in a host of poetry through the ages, subtly in the original Ode by Horace, far more aggressively through the years with Catullus through Shakespeare and Herrick, and ironically with Andrew Marvell. 

And is this harvesting metaphor, this plucking of fruit, significantly different in terms of how we spend our time? Hugely likely, something I want to explore a bit more today.

But I’ll add, too, that the larger set of lines from the original Horace Odes Book 1, Ode 11, which is where we get the phrase carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More:

Dum loquimur, fugerit invida / aetas: carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More, quam minimum credula postero

“While we speak, envious time will have fled: pluck the day, do not give your trust to the future.”

Time has already left us (the future perfect tense ‘fugerit’ for those grammarians out there); how fragile it is, how hungry it is to take our experiences from us, how intent upon devouring what we have. Time is personified, yes, and is sometimes here translated as a “devourer.” This is the imperative which drives our behavior, Horace argues, Marvell argues, Seize the Day advocates argue: Death can come at any time on winged chariot. Even Horace’s “fugerit” is sometimes recognized as not “fled” but “flown,” time as a winged elusive creature. 

It is the fear of death itself, a primary motive, that spurs us to action. It is this motivation which has created a hedonistic poetic tradition. We saw it in virtually every poem we’ve read so far, poems largely of seduction or even assault upon women, ironically or not. And it is this very anxiety, we’ve mentioned but not explored overmuch, that the Epicureans and others work to defeat. 

But the poets, to my mind, have largely lost something bigger. It shouldn’t surprise us, since Epicureanism was born as philosophy nearly 2300 years ago. They—the poets—scaled it down, replaced the larger ideals with simple hedonism–a selfish motivation. They replaced “sensuous” living (a general pleasure which comes from the sensory experience, of beauty and art as well) with the “sensual,” which leans more on stimulation and sexual pleasures. Now, I’m considering this hypothesis between sensuous and sensual with a bit of anachronism. It ironically wasn’t until much later that the more general pleasure of “sensuous” as a word even existed for us in this way; more ironically, it was poet John Milton (the Paradise Lost guy) who coined the word, and one of his best friends was our own Andrew Marvell. Milton, too, wanted to get away from all the sexual connotations.

Poly-Carpes

And THAT’s why hedonism is so cool. Go at it, kids . . . 

Ah, you see? Now I’ve got everyone who skipped over the recap chapter to wonder what I talked about. Regrets and missed opportunities, that’s the name of this game.

But I should perhaps think more on this hedonism angle. I mean, as an interpretation for carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More, it’s hard to argue against physical pleasure as a positive experience life offers. It’s only when it becomes obsessive, selfish to the point of being exploitative of others, that we run into real trouble with it. When it becomes, I don’t know, extraordinarily Bachhanalian or even Saturnalian? It’s interesting that, for those listeners with a set of more conventional Christian principles at work, we grow suspicious of hedonism. Christian history (and not just Christian history, I know) spends a fair amount of energy restricting the sensual pleasures, wanting us to focus on the eternal spirit. It’s also interesting that hedonism as an aspect of Epicureanism declined roughly in correspondence to the rise of Christianity.

Epicureanism was founded about 2300 years ago, around 311 BCE. The Roman StoicPoorly understood as being without emotion, the stoic philos... More philosopher Seneca defended it 400 years later, but by the 200s CE, it had pretty much fallen away. (Horace, though, living in the 1st century BCE, seemed to be in its Roman heyday.) By the rise of the Church and christianization of Rome in the 4th century, the West began its work to subdue sexual pleasure. Successful? I’ll let you judge.  

But perhaps we can agree here. Hedonism may or may not be inherently bad, but an unhealthy attachment to it as a monopolizing and exploitative philosophy certainly is. We should be ready to dismiss Marvell’s speaker here, and those of most all the Cavaliers and other carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More exploiters, as well.

—

But if we set aside carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More as hedonism, what’s left? There’s our popular understanding of it, the Dead Poet’s Society of the forceful seizure of every moment, living like it’s your last. 

Here, too, though, we’ve touched upon the problems that even the film identifies: Because this approach can apparently be self-centered, we miss the consequences of the behavior in relation to others. People are hurt from our “seizing,” disrupted from their own lives, held accountable by communities that–wisely or not–look for ways for us to live together. And are we really to make no plans for tomorrow at all?  Taken to an extreme, this sounds like an apocalyptic philosophy if we all adopt it. Someone’s got to plant the crops, right? And just try this approach of intuitively barreling through the world of business and see how it goes. 

So again, we have to put some brakes on a Peter Keating / Robert Herrick approach to carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More.

—

Okay, then, what about the Horace approach? Setting aside my interpretation that he, too, may have been taking advantage of the young servant or slave Leuconoe (LEW-co-no-AY), we do have the more proper translations of “pluck” and “gather.” 

Why not live a life of acceptance of what we are given? Enjoy what we have? Harvest the moments before us? Don’t look to or hope for the future, but embrace the now. Slow down. This might be the philosophy of Alana in Star Trek’s “World Enough and Time”: she literally embraces moments, finding pleasure in the experiences before her, complains of almost nothing, and cannot bear the idea of living without meaning or purpose, which she finds in these present moments of life. As modern philosopher Roman Krznaric might say, she focuses more on the Diem than the Carpe.

Sounds great! Though this, too, if left only this way, runs risks. Again, without looking or planning forward, we run into trouble. If we focus only on our own pleasures and moments, we might exclude others. Alana doesn’t seem to fall to these failures, but it’s easy to imagine that spending our days just meditating and plucking flowers will lead to wreckage somewhere.

—

I mentioned Roman Krznaric a moment ago, and it so happens that he has already made a fair examination of the very problems we’re looking at. His best book has been published under two titles in 2017–don’t be confused as I was; they are both the same book: Carpe DiemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More Regained or Carpe DiemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More: Seizing the Day in a Distracted World.  

In this book, Krznaric identifies two more ways we think about carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More:

One is the idea of the spontaneous life. Not exactly the idea of living for the now, though that’s a part of it, but to jump at opportunities as they arise, embrace surprise, take chances, try new things. Party party party. 

Now if this means trying out a new food or new sport or visiting a different kind of community, sounds great! But Krznaric also points out that this also can be disruptive, even self-destructive, if we abandon planning and practice along the way. Please don’t go alligator-wrestling screaming Yolo! And doing hard drugs on the job is a sure way to get someone else hurt.

Are you sensing a pattern? Carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More is starting to look like it needs a few rules or it needs to address some complexity. But before we get to this, Krznaric’s final example of how we use carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More today is political: to make the most of opportunities and openings which present themselves. To seize moments for the acquisitions or positionings of power. 

Yes, this aggressive strategy in politics and business too can seem sound; but I need hardly point out again that this would be the “seize” translation, not really the “pluck,” and it would nearly always come at someone else’s expense. 

–

So what’s happening here?

Well, we have a larger problem on our hands. Taken as is, a pithy bumper sticker or t-shirt philosophy, carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More left to itself is a messy phrase which now means several different ideas, some more or less exploitative, some more or less selfish, some more or less dangerous, depending upon how it’s being used. This is that polysemyWhen many simultaneous interpretations of a work of literatu... More we spoke of before, the idea that any term can offer multiple meanings–even contradictory ones–at the same time. 

An EpicureanA philosophy of simple and sensual pleasure as a goal of lif... More Ideal?

Now I’ve already put my money on the ideals of Epicureanism, counting (perhaps quite foolishly) on the “original philosophy” to fix all this. Isn’t that what we do? We go back to the canonCanon means "center," and a literary canon is a set of works... More, to the center, to the first or original version, for the kind of authority we seek?  

I know even now that this will not be the pay-off I’m looking for; I’m bracing for it. After all, Horace disappointed me already with low-key stalking of his young slave girl in the poem. More, I know, even as you do, that such a search is inherently flawed, a kind of romantic expectation that the Past has the Answers, that everyone was smarter then, wiser then.

It’s not wrong to look! Certainly we could argue that folks Back in the Day had a bit more time on their hands to reflect deeply about stuff. And we’ve all seen enough sloppy misreadings in our lives to know that today’s thinkers never fail to dismay us. So we’re going to look. And maybe–just maybe–we’ll be surprised. We’ll find near the roots of Western history a philosophy that assuages our fears of mortality, that helps us find lives meaningful and fulfilling, even . . . dare I ask for it, happy.

So let’s begin with one key idea of the Epicureans that should help with most of the crazy outcomes possible in today’s carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More philosophy: ataraxia. Sounds like a difficult word to get our heads around, but it’s basically “peace of mind,” freedom from distress and disturbance. That’s the main goal. To my thinking, “peace of mind” is a far distance from hedonism and other excesses. And it’s true. The Epicureans valued moderation, simple pleasures, those things which were ways to reach ataraxia. If the behavior causes pain, distress, guilt, anxiety, it’s a poor choice. If we spend our days seeking power, wealth, or fame, these are always attached to anxiety, future hopes and dread, risk and uncertainty, insecurity and guilt. It is in this context that we might better understand carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More. 

But wow. Notice how such a goal, this peace of mind, ataraxia, is almost the opposite of what many of us imagine carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More to be now. The first influencer you see on Insta who screams Yolo or talks about seizing the day is certainly not doing so. They’re likely agonizing about the right composition of their videos, the editing, and the number of Likes translated as dollars they will earn. 

It also certainly cannot be Marvell’s speaker, who–emulating and mocking the long tradition of carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More poets–is hugely anxious about death and seeks to postpone it through a grotesque seduction. 

Good. We see this. What else are these Epicureans about?

Well, matched with this ataraxia, which is really an internal freedom from anxiety, we have an external idea of the absence of bodily pain, what they call aponia. Makes sense. Pain is no fun. 

But let’s notice that the Epicureans are not seeking a something, but the absence of or freedom from something. Their idea of pleasure is the absence of pain. Difficult to achieve, yes, but also a pretty low bar for our definition of pleasure. In other words, if I’m faced with rice crackers, green beans, and ice cream with fresh fruit, I might embrace each equally with joy as none of them cause me  pain, though the hedonist might say “I scream, you scream!”  (We all scream for ice cream)

Now to be sure, I keep using sensuous pleasures in examples. Let’s go back to that mental pleasure for a moment. The Epicureans valued the longer-enduring mental or emotional pleasures more  than the physical ones, which were always temporary. In fact, they sought what they called a state of eudaimonia [yoo-duh-mo-nee-ah], and I’m by now reaching my quota on Greek and Latin terms, so I’ll try to hold off giving any more. But eudaimonia is defined as a “deep well-being or flourishing,” much closer to what we might achieve in meditation or even gardening. 

To achieve ataraxia, to reach eudaimonia, we didn’t go out looking for pleasures at all, but worked instead to control our desires. Let me underscore that a bit more: the goal was to control our desires. My, what a 180 we’ve done to this philosophy! 

• Now obviously we do have a desire to eat, clothe ourselves against weather, things like that. To avoid it would cause us pain, so these desires are fine.
• Other natural desires are also acceptable, but not needed: having friends, finding love, enjoying humor, stuff like that.
• But the rest, those which are unnatural and promote our self-centered vanity? Those which, even when temporarily fulfilled, only cause more pain and anxiety? Money? Status? Get rid of them.

So far so good?

Now here is where it gets a little more troublesome for a lot of us. The Epicureans were atomists, materialists, believing that the universe was made out of atoms. Their idea of atoms was different from ours, but not really in practice. We’re all just really small bits of physical matter. Everything is matter, coming together and dissolving all the time. There is something, and then there is nothing. They’re early scientists or empiricists, in this sense.

But this means, too, that the universe as a whole is no different. The world, the universe, could not care less about us. Whether or not gods exist, then, is irrelevant. They have no bearing on this idea of materialism. Any god that is out there is too far away to care or interfere with our lives. When we die, we dissolve into nothing; that is all. No afterlife, no divine judgment or punishments. We’re just done.

Therefore, they argue, we need not fear death, because by the time it comes, we won’t care. The only thing we need to focus on are our own free choices. Since there is no divine morality, the only moral choices left to us are thus about keeping our lives content, eudaimonia. 

Ah.

So the reason why we live a “harvest the day” philosophy is because there is nothing else in the universe that we need to answer to. We are accountable to nothing but ourselves and to each other in the communities we experience.

You may remember back some time ago that critic Camille Paglia called Andrew Marvell’s poem a “brazenly pagan message,” and now we see why. Without a Christian afterlife (or any divine promise), there is no external accountabilityAccountability is a claim on our actions, but it is external... More for our behavior. Carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More is anti-Christian in this sense, or at the very least, agnostic about the role of the divine. More, the world is not then at all deterministic; we have free will, and it is the most important thing we can use. Choose.

Isn’t this almost exactly what Alana tells her father Sulu in the Star Trek: New Voyages episode?

“I don’t know if there’s an afterlife. I don’t know where we go when we die. Oh, but father, it’s not how long we live, it’s how we live that matters. Let my life mean something.”

She chooses to prioritize the meaning and significance of her life and sacrifice over mere length of life.

Now there is more to Epicureanism than I’ve outlined here, of course, but these are the key points that apply to us in our search. 

And we take moving forward now, this idea: that somehow carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More has been turned into a concept that operates nearly opposite to what the original philosophy had in mind.

Krznaric’s Carpe

Roman Krznaric has a lot of ideas about what went wrong, and if I were going to pull them all together into a single label, it might be something like Huxley’s Brave New World. Our culture sells us this bumper sticker version of philosophy (I said that’s quite enough, Peter!) and gets us by doing so to become more productive, to buy more, and to remain passive while we do so. Krznaric calls this “Just plan it, just buy it, and just watch it.” He adds one more imperative, “Just breathe” to capture the ‘mindfulness’ movement which is sold to us, as well.

I get it. 

• My scheduling apps tell me how many seconds I’ve used and how I can better plan my work flow, all for $9.99/month.
• AARP is selling me river cruises before I die. Cheap if I act now rather than after I’m dead.
• I’m currently anxious about the newest season of Black Mirror and not watching it in time to talk about it with my friends.
• But I should definitely spend more time in self-care. And guess what? There’s an app for that, too.

This has gotten to be a mess, hasn’t it? But that’s because we’re only part-way through our discussion on the Epicureans and the carpe diemSimply translated as "Pluck" or "Seize" "the Day," it is the... More concept as life philosophy. I want to examine more of this philosopher Roman Krznaric’s concerns, test the morality of the Epicureans so we don’t all become Dorian Grays, and seeing if I can find some responsible answer for my questions from Marvell. 

And I want to do it while looking at a poem I came across by Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke. Here’s the poem: 

Apollo’s Archaic Torso

 

We cannot know his incredible head,
where the eyes ripened like apples,
yet his torso still glows like a candelabrum,
from which his gaze, however dimmed,

still persists and gleams. If this were not so,
the curve of his breast could not blind you,
nor could a smile, steered by the gentle curve
of his loins, glide to the centre of procreation.

And this stone would seem disfigured and stunted,
the shoulders descending into nothing,
unable to glisten like a predator’s pelt,

or burst out from its confines and radiate
like a star: for there is no angle from which
it cannot see you. You have to change your life.

Yes. Yes, we do. I have some apps to delete, some writing to do, some local politics to engage, and also, until we talk again next week, you know what else you and I both have to do?

Go read something. 

Outro

Follow me and find me along with supplements, bonus episodes, resources, newsletters, and still more at Waywords Studio dot com.  That’s Waywords Studio (two s’s in the middle) dot com. Thanks for listening! 

Music for Literary Nomads is by Randon Myles

Chapter headings by Natalie Harrison and Sarah Skaleski

Literary Nomads is a production of Waywords Studio. Find me at Waywords Studio on most social media and at Waywords Studio .com.

Bibliography