Read an Excerpt

CARPE DIEM FROM HORACE TO #YOLO

On a summer morning in 2014, eighty-nine-year-old Bernard Jordan decided to escape. The former British naval officer was determined to go to Normandy to celebrate the seventieth anniversary of the D-Day landings with other World War II veterans. But there was a problem: he was trapped in a nursing home in the English seaside town of Hove, without permission to travel. What could he do? Bernard came up with a cunning plan. He got up early and put on his best suit, making sure to pin on his wartime medals, then covered his outfit with a gray raincoat and sneaked out of the home. Now free, he tottered down to the railway station nearly a mile away and took the next train to Portsmouth. Once there, he bought himself a ticket for the ferry to France and, on board, joined up with a party of war veterans who took him under their wing for the rest of the trip.

As soon as the care staff realized he was missing, a frantic police search began on the streets of Hove and in local hospitals. But by then it was too late. Bernard was already across the Channel, surrounded by marching bands and dancing girls. “I loved every minute of it and would do it again tomorrow—it was such an exciting experience,” he said on his return. “I expect I will be in some trouble with the care home, but it was worth it. I was naughty, but I had to be there.”[i]

The story of Bernard’s great escape took the British media by storm, knocking the sober anniversary speeches by world leaders and royalty off the front pages. The ferry company even offered him free travel to the Normandy beaches for the rest of his life. But Bernard was never able to take up that offer: six months later, he died.

Why did Bernard’s adventure capture so much public attention? It was not just nostalgia for the wartime spirit or his venerable age. People also admired his courage to seize a window of opportunity that might never come again. The chance was there, and he took it. As one person commented in an online forum just after his death: “RIP, am doubly glad he escaped and got to go to the anniversary . . . carpe diem.”[ii]

Carpe diem—“seize the day”—is one of the oldest philosophical mottoes in Western history. First uttered by the Roman poet Horace more than two thousand years ago, it retains an extraordinary resonance in popular culture. The heavy metal band Metallica has rocked audiences around the world with their song “Carpe Diem Baby,” while the actress Judi Dench had “CARPE DIEM” tattooed on her wrist for her eighty-first birthday. Ask someone to spell out their philosophy of life and there’s a good chance they will say something like “seize the day” or “live as if there’s no tomorrow”—even if they appear to be trapped by routine or paralyzed by procrastination. It’s a message found in Hollywood films like Dead Poets Society, in one of the most successful brand campaigns of the last century (“Just Do It”), and in the social media hashtag #YOLO (“you only live once”). Almost every language has an equivalent expression for the original Latin phrase. In Japanese it’s 今を楽しめ (“enjoy now”), while wise Slovak grandmothers advise the young to ži naplno (“live fully”). Carpe diem has been a call to arms for everyone from the Jewish sage Hillel the Elder, who in the first century BCE asked, “If not now, when?” to the Rastafarian sage Bob Marley, who sang out, “Wake up and live!” If Horace were transported to the present, he would probably be surprised to discover that there is a heaving nightclub in Croatia named Carpe Diem, and dozens of fashion companies with carpe diem clothing lines—including a T-shirt that commands us all to “Carpe That F*cking Diem.”

It is remarkable that an expression from a long-dead language generates more than twenty-five million online search results. But just as striking is the fact that while most people can explain what carpe diem means to them, the answer varies greatly from one person to the next. For some, it’s about that Bernard Jordan attitude of grasping a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Yet others associate it with wild, hedonistic blowouts, or immersing themselves calmly in the present moment. This range of responses is reflected in the diverse translations of “carpe diem” that abound: while usually rendered as “seize” the day, it is sometimes translated as “harvest,” “pluck,” or “enjoy” the day. We might casually use the term “carpe diem” when chatting with a friend, but how aware are we of its many personalities hidden beneath the surface?

This book is my attempt to unravel how we think about carpe diem—to explore its various meanings and messages, its dangers and contradictions, its role in both personal life and social change. It might sound strange to talk about carpe diem as if it were an abstract noun like “love” or “truth,” but I consider it to be a philosophical ideal that embodies a vision of how to live, similar to concepts such as happiness or freedom, and so I write about it in a comparable way. I want to understand what really motivates it, and what can make it such a difficult ideal to follow. Is carpe diem ultimately about the fear of death, a remedy for that instinctive—but often fleeting—awareness so many of us have that life is short and our time is running out? Or is it just as much about expressing our desire for freedom and being the author of our own life?

My approach is necessarily eclectic, taking in everything from medieval carnival tradition to the neuropsychology of risk, from the history of opium addiction to existentialist thought. I will be delving into the lives of great seize-the-day practitioners, including nightclub dancers, war photographers, and committed revolutionaries. While mainly drawing on examples from the Western world, this is a journey that will take us from the streets of ancient Kyoto to the streets of contemporary Rio. To my knowledge, this is the first-ever cultural and philosophical biography of carpe diem—which is astonishing given its bumper-sticker ubiquity in everyday life.

In the course of writing this book I have made two discoveries. First, that carpe diem has been hijacked, and as a result its potential to transform our lives is rapidly slipping away from us. Second, that humanity has, over the centuries, found five distinct ways to seize the day—and if we want to win back carpe diem from the hijackers, we need to revive them. My hope is to wake us up to the promise of Horace’s maxim. The prize it offers is great: nothing less than the gift of radical aliveness or, to borrow a phrase from Henry David Thoreau, the possibility “to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life.”[iii] If, however, we fail to heed its call, we may end up reaching our final days and looking back on life with regret, viewing it as a series of paths not taken. The time has come to reclaim carpe diem.

THE VANISHING ART OF SEIZING THE DAY

The hijack of carpe diem is the existential crime of the century—and one that we have barely noticed. It might seem odd to claim that a phrase from a dead Roman poet has been “hijacked,” but the evidence is compelling. Who, or what, are the hijackers in question? First, the spirit of “seize the day” has been surreptitiously hijacked by consumer culture, which has recast it as Black Friday shopping sprees and the instant hit of one-click online buying: in essence, Just Do It has come to mean Just Buy It. Alongside this is the growing cult of efficiency and time management that has driven us toward hyper-scheduled living, turning the spontaneity of Just Do It into a culture of Just Plan It. A third hijacker is 24-7 digital entertainment, which is replacing vibrant life experiences with vicarious, screen-based pleasures, and contributing to a new age of distraction. Rather than Just Do It, we increasingly Just Watch It instead. Finally—and though it might seem counterintuitive—carpe diem has been hijacked by the booming mindfulness movement. While practicing mindfulness has many proven benefits, from reducing stress to helping with depression, one of its unintended consequences has been to encourage the idea that seizing the day is primarily about living in the here and now. Just Do It has become Just Breathe.

Confronted by these four hijackers, the art of seizing the day is vanishing before our eyes, and we urgently need to do something about it, or else risk losing touch with the carpe diem wisdom of humanity that has accumulated over the past two millennia. I will be exploring in detail how this cultural hijacking has happened, and how we might best respond.

What about my second discovery? Curious to find out more about the different meanings people give to carpe diem, I decided to dig deeper and embark on a study of the way that phrases such as “carpe diem,” “seize the day,” and “seize the moment” have been used across the arts, sciences, literature, popular culture, and media. This involved analyzing hundreds of original sources going back to the sixteenth century, with the help of a crack research team and some big databases in the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library.[iv] A fascinating pattern soon began to emerge, revealing five essential interpretations of carpe diem through the centuries, an ensemble of ways that humankind has developed to seize the day.

The most popular of these interpretations I call opportunity, which concerns taking a window of opportunity that may never be repeated, whether it’s the career break of a lifetime or the chance to rescue a crumbling relationship. A second strategy is hedonism, where we seize the day through sensory pleasures, from free love to gastronomic exploration. Another is presence, which includes mindfully entering the present moment through methods such as meditation, but also extends to more vigorous activities such as the intense rush of extreme sports or getting entranced in dance. Fourth is spontaneity, which involves throwing plans and routines to the wind and becoming more experimental in the way we live. Finally, there is the approach that is most often ignored or forgotten: politics. This is the realm of collective carpe diem, such as taking to the streets to topple a dictator or mobilizing a social movement to tackle climate change.

These five paths cannot be found neatly laid out in any one spiritual tradition or philosophical doctrine, and we are mostly unaware of them. Although sometimes overlapping, they represent a distinct range of cultural tendencies, each of them a strategy that human beings have invented to inoculate themselves against the reality of death and to make the most of their brief moment of earthly existence. And why do they matter? Because it is precisely these rich approaches that have been hijacked. The challenge is to reclaim our cultural inheritance by reviving this quintet of ways to seize the day and harnessing their insights for the art of living.

This is an important historical moment for doing so. Despite living longer and more materially prosperous lives than at almost any moment in the past, and enjoying the benefits of handy iGadgets, cheap flights, and perfectly brewed gourmet coffee, Western societies seem to be failing to deliver personal well-being. There is an epidemic of mental illness—especially anxiety and depression—and record figures of job dissatisfaction. In most countries levels of “life satisfaction” have remained stagnant even when incomes have been rising. The arrival of efficient online dating has been accompanied by divorce rates of around 40 percent.[v] More and more of our time is taken up managing a deluge of emails, texts, and tweets that keep us checking our phones, on average, 110 times a day, and which leave us in a state of continuous partial attention.[vi] All this is compounded by a sense that society is malfunctioning on a broader level, visible in increasing inequality, the rise of extremism, corrupt and ineffective politicians, and impending ecological collapse.

It is no surprise, then, that the self-help industry is in such excellent health, now valued at more than $10 billion annually in the United States alone: the search is on for new routes to a more fulfilling and meaningful life.[vii] The happiness gurus have been out in force proposing alternatives to the increasingly obsolete model of consumer culture that has brought comfort and pleasure to some but left so many others wondering if it was really worth working so hard, or getting into so much debt, to taste its delights. We might turn to positive psychology or life coaching, or maybe holistic medicine or voluntary simplicity. We could join a therapy group, try a stress-management course, or take solace in that ancient method known as religion. But among all these options, there is one that appears to have been largely overlooked: carpe diem. If we can rescue it from the hijackers, we might come to see it as a way to cut through the confusing array of possibilities by focusing our attention not so much on what we choose but that we choose.

We should be hopeful about the power of carpe diem, yet not become ideological zealots who believe that pursuing any one of its five forms will miraculously and automatically boost our well-being. It’s important to find the right balance between them and recognize when not to cultivate them. Seizing the day can, at times, be reckless, dangerous, or even immoral. It might be rash to leave a steady job to open up your dream café if you’ve got a big mortgage to repay. Hedonism can easily turn into excess, evident everywhere from gluttony among the ancient Romans to the Neknomination online binge drinking craze, where kudos come from being filmed downing whole pints of spirits.[viii] Think of how many carpe diem love affairs have led to broken marriages and divided families. And what about the bankers who seized opportunities for financial speculation that allowed them to make a killing while sparking the 2008 global financial crisis?

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 emigrated as a refugee from Poland to Australia after World War II, and struggled 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.[ix]

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.”[x] I too wanted a taste of that exuberant freedom in my mouth. Halfway 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, secondhand 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 realized, 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 at 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.[xi]
 
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 proposes that we should therefore believe in God, to stave off the uncertainty. My 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 succor out of nothing.”[xii] 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 practicing 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.[xiii] 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 among 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 meter, 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.[xiv]
 
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 opportunities 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 two hundred years. If you search through copies of the Times of London 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.[xv]

This is certainly how carpe diem is understood in the film that has done more than any other to popularize 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 one day going to stop breathing, turn 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.[xvi]
 
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.

A very different view of Ode XI is to emphasize 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.[xvii] This perspective became particularly prevalent in the seventeenth century, when the “carpe diem poem” emerged as a literary genre. Among 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 wingèd 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.”[xviii] 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 bedchamber. Let’s stop wasting time by talking (“even as we speak, envious time flies past”) and get on with it, right now.[xix]

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 savoring 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.[xx]

This interpretation of carpe diem has become prominent in the media and public culture since the turn of the millennium, in large part 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.[xxi] This is a 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 labor.[xxii] 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’s 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 phrases “carpe diem,” “seize the day,” and “seize the moment” have been commonly used to refer to making the most of political openings or possibilities.[xxiii] 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.”[xxiv] When Richard Nixon made his historic visit to China in 1972, he declared that China and the United States should “Seize the day! Seize the hour!” while Bill Clinton used “seize the day” eleven times in public speeches on the final day of his 1996 campaign for reelection.[xxv] When tens of thousands of Germans breached the Berlin Wall on the night of November 9, 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.[xxvi]

Horace was a poet rather than a philosopher, more interested in aesthetic expression than presenting his ideas with analytical rigor and definitional precision. It may be unsurprising, then, that people have interpreted his poem in such different ways. Carpe diem clearly comes in many flavors, 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. Keating (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.