41 The value of experiential learning has been well established for at least a century, going back to the writings of the philosopher John Dewey, and even earlier to Montaigne (Montaigne 1958, 343–406).
42 Nicholl 2005, 7.
43 Jay 2006, 10.
44 Emerson’s journal, November 11th, 1842, http://www.perfectidius.com/Volume_6_1842-1844.pdf
45 http://www.mama.org/exhibits/modernist/sculpture/giacometti/. I do not know if Giacometti ever read Horace, but he was a great friend of Sartre’s, who admired his elongated human forms as an expression of existentialism.
Epilogue:
A Carpe Diem Mandala
Horace is not known for his humility. ‘I have built a monument more lasting than bronze and set higher than the pyramids of kings,’ he proclaims in the final poem of his third book of Odes. ‘I shall not wholly die. A great part of me will escape Libitina.’1 He was talking about his poems, and the Libitina in question was the Roman goddess of funerals. As the son of a freed slave who rose to become a famous lyricist and confidant of the Emperor, perhaps he had some grounds to be boastful. His apparently smug declaration might also have been a way of saying that his verse explored the universal themes of everyday life – from love and friendship to mortality – and would therefore stand the test of time.
Whatever his intention, he was right. Horace is still read today, and he may have no greater legacy than the fragment of Ode XI that has inspired this book: carpe diem. Over the last three years it has been my guide and companion, taking me on an exhilarating journey into myriad realms, including the history of sexuality, Renaissance poetry, moral philosophy, theatrical improvisation, and the lives of surfing fanatics, drug addicts and political activists. I find it extraordinary that a mere two words from an ancient poem have touched on so many aspects of human culture, and generated such a rich tapestry of associations.
Given this diversity inherent in the carpe diem ideal, it is difficult to draw any single conclusion about its meaning or message. There is no supreme life lesson that it offers the world, no definitive set of principles or commandments. What I have done, however, is bring together the main elements and arguments of this book into a single picture – a Carpe Diem Mandala. The word ‘mandala’ comes from the Sanskrit for ‘circle’, and typically refers to a symbolic representation of the universe that focuses the mind and offers spiritual guidance. I am using the term more loosely. The mandala I have created functions as a mental aide-mémoire for thinking about seize-the-day choices. It is not a prescriptive device that directs us to making particular decisions but rather represents an attitude we can take in our lives, where we keep the possibility of seizing the day at the forefront of our minds. It is less about what to do and more about how to do it, reminding us of the different ways of putting Horace’s advice into practice, and the challenges of doing so.2
At the mandala’s centre lie the core existential drives of freedom and death, which have an interdependent, yin-yang relationship with one another.3 Our carpe diem instinct partly emerges from the deep human desire for freedom, to feel that we have agency and the capacity to shape the course of our own lives rather than have our fate chosen for us. But it is also a product of knowing that the time we have for expressing this freedom is limited by the prospect of death, and that we ought to make the best of it before the clock strikes, or risk being consumed by regret. Like the Venerable Bede’s sparrow flying into the warmth and light of the king’s hall, we only have the briefest moment to spread our wings before flitting out again into the dark night. What path should our flight take as we sweep through the fire-lit room? With whom should we fly? To what purpose? Freedom and death compel us to make the choices that determine the course of our journey.
The mandala is encircled by the five ways to seize the day that humankind has discovered over the centuries. Between them and the core drives are four kinds of barriers to putting Horace’s ideal into practice. There are the cultural hijackers that threaten to co-opt carpe diem and narrow its scope, such as the Just Watch It enticements of the home entertainment industry and the Just Breathe mantra of the mindfulness movement. These are accompanied by the psychological blocks of procrastination, risk, overload and apathy, the socioeconomic barriers of power and inequality, and the pervasive influence of death denial, which prevents us from tasting the elixir of our mortality. They are formidable obstacles, but not impossible to surmount. The challenge is to overcome them and get back in touch with the accumulated carpe diem wisdom of humanity.
I would like to see this Carpe Diem Mandala become a tattoo as popular as the current vogue for having the words ‘carpe diem’ etched in Gothic script on your skin. It might be a little wordy and complicated, requiring extra painful pricks, but it would offer a deeper and more nuanced depiction of what the carpe diem ideal is all about. Personally, though, I’m happy to keep it on the lock screen of my phone, a portal I have to pass through every time I want to send a text or check my email.
Although carpe diem is a philosophy with roots going back centuries, it is not an ideal frozen in time. How might it evolve in the future? It will no doubt be influenced by factors such as our increasing lifespans and growing wealth inequality. But perhaps the most powerful – and least predictable – dynamic shaping its destiny will be the impact of digital technologies. An electronically networked society is rushing toward us at breakneck speed, with the potential to alter almost every aspect of seizing the day. As we have seen, this is already happening. Impulsive one-click shopping has helped consumer culture to hijack carpe diem, and our efforts to manage a flood of digital information lock many of us into a ‘just plan it’ mentality of hyper-scheduling.
Where it will go next is uncertain. Back in the 1990s many technology theorists were hopeful that the internet would release an explosion of individuality and free expression. But since those heady days, it has become a place of increasing conformity, passivity and social control. Instead of building their own websites, full of creativity and personal quirks, millions of people express their digital selves in the ready-made formats of social networking sites such as Facebook, fitting themselves into the narrow categories offered on the profile page, and have become experts at boiling their thoughts down to 140-character tweets.4 The end result could be what the novelist Zadie Smith has called a ‘flattening’ of the human personality, where social media erodes our capacity to express our individuality and uniqueness.5 We can also become trapped in the echo-chamber of digital networks, surrounded by like-minded voices that cut us off from fresh ways of looking at ourselves and the world.
Yet there is room for optimism that can counter such dystopian visions. There are digital designers, artists, software programmers and social entrepreneurs who are adept at using technology to express their creative selves and personal values, and most of us have now had experiences of falling in love, finding community or discovering new aspects of our political selves online. Moreover, technologies such as video gaming and virtual reality, as well as chat rooms and messaging, are generally more interactive than that paragon of passivity known as television, which has done so much to sap our carpe diem energies. The problem is that most technologies still place a filter between us and analogue reality, expanding the dominion of mediated, secondary experience. It might be fun to play virtual football for your favourite team, but it is very different from the intense cut and thrust of a real game.
Although we spend an increasing proportion of our waking hours online, I also know that Horace’s words have retained their cultural power for more than two millennia, and his call to seize the day will not be easily silenced by the incessant electronic texts and tweets invading our minds. I am as addicted as anyone to digital media, yet in the course of writing this book have still been able to hear Horace’s voice, and have become more inspired than ever by the philosophy of carpe diem. I have found myself doing things I have never done before, from attending an acting workshop to kayaking with basking sharks, a
nd am engaging in political activism for the first time in more than a decade. I have taken my kids on crazy camping adventures and let them frolic in the rain, and – yes – have even become a little more mindful along the way. After years of procrastinating, I finally found the courage to establish the world’s first Empathy Museum, an international travelling exhibition dedicated to helping us look through other people’s eyes – and I have Horace to thank for it. I admit that these are not earth-shattering examples of carpe diem living. I haven’t done a parachute jump or moved with my family to Timbuktu, and I probably still spend too much time reading biographies of people like Patrick Leigh Fermor. But with the mandala in my mind, I feel my life opening up to new possibilities.
In our age of individualism, we are too easily drawn toward seeking such possibilities for ourselves alone, focusing narrowly on the question, ‘What’s in it for me?’ But their full richness arises when our gaze shifts beyond the self. We are social creatures who thrive in and depend upon community. The real future of seizing the day is in striving to ‘just do it’ not only for ourselves, but for others, and with others. That is how we can transform carpe diem into a common treasury to be shared by all.
Notes
1 Horace 2000, 108.
2 Baggini 2005, 135.
3 Yalom 1980, 8–9.
4 Lanier 2011, 16; www.edge.org/q2010/q10_9.html
5 http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2010/11/25/generation-why/
Appendix:
Films, Songs and Poems
Here is a select list of crowd-sourced films, songs and poems on the theme of carpe diem. I’ve also thrown in a few of my own favourites. In honour of Horace’s Ode XI, there are eleven items in each category.
FILMS
Ikiru (Akira Kurosawa, 1952)
Harold and Maude (Hal Ashby, 1971)
McCullin (David Morris and Jacqui Morris, 2012)
Zorba the Greek (Mihalis Kakogiannis, 1964)
The Brand New Testament (Jaco Van Dormael, 2015)
Ways of Seeing (John Berger/Michael Dibb, 1972)
About Time (Richard Curtis, 2013)
After Life (Hirokazu Koreeda, 1998)
Trainspotting (Danny Boyle, 1996)
Dead Poets Society (Peter Weir, 1989)
Man on Wire (James Marsh, 2008)
SONGS
Lou Reed, ‘Perfect Day’
Eminem, ‘Lose Yourself’
Nils Frahm, ‘Says’
Metallica, ‘Carpe Diem Baby’
Henry Purcell, ‘When I Am Laid in Earth (Dido’s Lament)’
Seize the Day, ‘With My Hammer’
Iggy Pop, ‘Lust for Life’
Guy Lombardo, ‘Enjoy Yourself’
Bob Marley, ‘Wake Up and Live’
Prince, ‘1999’
Pink Floyd, ‘Time’
POEMS
Horace, Ode XI, Book 1 (‘Tu ne quaesieris’)
Edward FitzGerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám
Emily Dickinson, ‘A Death blow is a Life blow to Some’
Tony Harrison, ‘Polygons’
Robert Frost, ‘Carpe Diem’
Andrew Marvell, ‘To His Coy Mistress’
Walt Whitman, ‘I Sing the Body Electric’
A.E. Housman, ‘XVI: How Clear, How Lovely Bright’
Robert Herrick, ‘To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time’
Philip Larkin, ‘Days’
Dylan Thomas, ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’
Further Reading
Adams, John (2001) Risk (London, Routledge).
Adorno, Theodor and Max Horkheimer (1997) Dialectic of Enlightenment (London, Verso).
Anderson, William S. (1992) ‘Horace’s Different Recommenders of “Carpe Diem” in C. 1.4, 7, 9, 11’, The Classical Journal, Vol. 88 No.2: 115–122.
Angelou, Maya (2004) The Collected Autobiographies of Maya Angelou (New York, Modern Library).
Angelou, Maya (2009) Letter to My Daughter (London, Virago).
Arendt, Hannah (1989) The Human Condition (Chicago, University of Chicago Press).
Ariès, Philippe (2008) The Hour of Our Death (New York, Vintage).
Armstrong, Alison and Tim Jackson (2015) ‘The Mindful Consumer: Mindfulness Training and the Escape from Consumerism’, a report for Friends of the Earth, Big Ideas Project, London.
Arsenault, Darin J. and Tamer Fawzy (2001) ‘Just Buy It: Nike Advertising Aimed at Glamour Readers: A Critical Feminist Analysis’, Tamara: Journal of Critical Postmodern Organization, Vol. 1 Issue 2: 63–76.
Aurelius, Marcus (2006) Meditations, translated by Martin Hammond (London, Penguin).
Baggini, Julian (2005) What’s It All About? Philosophy and the Meaning of Life (London, Granta).
Bakewell, Sarah (2016) At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being and Apricot Cocktails (London, Chatto & Windus).
Baumeister, Roy and John Tierney (2012) Willpower: Why Self-Control is the Secret to Success (London, Penguin).
Beard, Mary (2010) Pompeii: The Life of a Roman Town (London, Profile Books).
Beckett, Samuel (2006) Waiting for Godot (London, Faber & Faber).
Behtash, Esmail Z. (2012) ‘The Reception of FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát of ‘Umar Khayyām by the Victorians’, in A.A. Seyed-Gohrab (ed) The Great Umar Khayyām: A Global Reception of the Rubáiyát (Leiden, Leiden University Press): 203–14.
Bellow, Saul (2001) Seize the Day (London, Penguin).
Berger, John (1965) Success and Failure of Picasso (Harmondsworth, Penguin).
Berger, John (1972) Ways of Seeing (London, BBC Books and Harmondsworth, Penguin).
Blackburn, Simon (2004) Lust (Oxford, Oxford University Press).
Bourdieu, Pierre (1998) On Television (New York, New Press).
Buckley, David (2005) Strange Fascination: David Bowie, The Definitive Story (London, Virgin Books).
Burka, Jane and Lenora Yuen (2008) Procrastination: Why You Do It, What to Do About It Now (Cambridge MA, Da Capo Press).
Burton, Richard (1963) The Perfumed Garden of the Shaykh Nefzawi (London, Panther).
Burton, Robert (1838) The Anatomy of Melancholy (London, B. Blake).
Camus, Albert (2005) The Myth of Sisyphus (London, Penguin).
Canetti, Elias (1962) Crowds and Power (London, Victor Gollancz).
Cannadine, David (1984) ‘The Victorian Sex Wars’, New York Review of Books, February 2nd: 1–9.
Castells, Manuel (2015) Networks of Outrage and Hope: Social Movements in the Internet Age (Cambridge, Polity).
Castells, Manuel and Mukul Kumar (2014) ‘A Conversation With Manuel Castells’, Berkeley Planning Journal, Vol. 27 No.1: 93–99.
Center for Applied Research (1999) ‘Nike’s “Just Do It” Advertising Campaign’, Philadelphia PA.
Chang, Ruth (2014) ‘How to Make Hard Choices’, TED Talk, https://www.ted.com/talks/ruth_chang_how_to_make_hard_
choices?language=en
Cohen, Elliot (2010) ‘From the Bodhi Tree, to the Analyst’s Couch, then to the MRI Scanner: The Psychologisation of Buddhism’, Annual Review of Critical Psychology, Vol. 8: 97–119.
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor (1991) Coleridge Among the Lakes & Mountains (London, The Folio Society).
Colish, Marcia L. (1985) The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages, Volume II: Stoicism in Christian Latin Thought through the Sixth Century (Leiden, E.J. Brill).
Collins, Michael and Stewart A. Carter (2001) ‘Improvisation §II: Western Art Music’ in Sadie Stanley and John Tyrrell (eds) The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New York, Oxford University Press): 1–34.
Comfort, Alex (1996) The Joy of Sex (London, Mitchell Beazley).
Coombs, Danielle Sarver (2014) ‘Nike: Goddess of Victory, Gods of Sport’ in Danielle Sarver Coombs and Bob Batchelor, We Are What We Sell: How Advertising Shapes American Life… And Always Has (Santa Barbara, Praeger).
Cooper, Artemis (2013) Patrick Leigh Fermor: An Adventure (London, John Murray).
Cox, Gary (2011) How to Be an Existentialist (London, Continuum).
Crawford, Matthew (2015) The World Beyond Your Head: How to Flourish in an Age of Distraction (London, Viking).
Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly (2002) Flow: The Classic Work on How to Achieve Happiness (London, Rider).
Dabhoiwala, Faramerz (2013) The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution (London, Penguin).
Darwin, Charles (1977) The Voyage of the ‘Beagle’ (London, J.M. Dent & Sons).
De Beauvoir, Simone (1997) The Second Sex (London, Vintage).
De Beauvoir, Simone (2015) The Ethics of Ambiguity (New York, Open Road).
Debord, Guy (2010) Society of the Spectacle (Detroit, Black & Red).
De Quincey (1862) Confessions of an English Opium-Eater: De Quincey’s Works Volume I (Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black).
Duncan, Ronald (1964) All Men Are Islands: An Autobiography (London, Rupert Hart-Davis).
Dunstan, D.W., E.L. Barr, G.N. Healy, J. Salmon, J.E. Shaw, B. Balkau, D.J. Magliano, A.J. Cameron, P.Z. Zimmet, N. Owen (2010) ‘Television Viewing Time and Mortality: The Australian Diabetes, Obesity and Lifestyle Study (AusDiab)’, Circulation Vol. 121: 384–391.
Eagleman, David (2009) Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives (Edinburgh, Canongate).
Edwards, John (1988) The Roman Cookery of Apicius (London, Rider Books).
Ehrenreich, Barbara (2006) Dancing on the Street: A History of Collective Joy (New York, Metropolitan Books).
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1995) Essays and Poems (London, J.M. Dent).
Ewen, Stuart (1996) PR! A Social History of Spin (New York, Basic Books).
Eyres, Harry (2013) Horace and Me: Life Lessons from an Ancient Poet (London, Bloomsbury).
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