You don’t hear Robin Williams speak Latin too often. So when he does it’s worth mentioning. He’s not exactly fluent, in fact he only seems to know one phrase, but I shouldn’t think he’s bothered. He’s hardly about to apply for a job at the Vatican.
As the inspirational teacher Professor Keating in Peter Weir’s ‘Dead Poets’ Society” he loses his job in tragic circumstances for encouraging his pupils to ‘make their lives extraordinary’. In the central scene he leads them out of the classroom into the school’s chilly main corridor. Confronting them with the sepia photographs of generations past he urges on these teenagers a sense of their own mortality. Do what you can now, he says, because your lives will soon pass as theirs have done. Seize the Day. Carpe Diem.
As Mrs Doubtfire he tries an alternative version. When his false-teeth fall into a glass of water, temporarily undermining his – already unconvincing – drag disguise, he shouts to distract attention. Carpe Dentum. Seize the Teeth. Those who have already seen the Peter Weir film are in on the joke.
That you can make a joke out of a Latin tag at all testifies to its familiarity. The phrase, taken from a poem by the Roman writer Horace, is one of very few that have really passed into our language. It’s now most often used as a byword for irresponsibility and short-termism, as if the uncertainty of tomorrow excuses any behaviour today.
The original context is far subtler than that. The poem in question, the eleventh Ode in Horace’s First book of Odes, is a complex mixture of the fatalistic and the celebratory. ‘Don’t ask’, it begins’, ‘what end the gods have in mind for you and me...don’t go consulting Babylonian astrologers to find out.’ Here’s the fatalism, a chill tone that is intensified in the next few lines. ‘It could be that this is the last winter Jupiter has granted you, this winter that now pounds itself to exhaustion on the crags of the Tyrrhenian Sea’.
In the central part the celebratory tone cuts in. ‘Wise up, have a drink, stop making long-term plans’. And finally the poem turns lyrical.
“dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.’
‘Even as we’re speaking envious time escapes us: seize the day, trust as little as you may in the morrow.’
It’s a beautiful piece. So concise but so varied. An invocation to merry-making, but a melancholy merry-making. No wonder it’s endured.
For it captures the essence of the past and its hold on us, the pathos of the past, in a way that Peter Weir conveyed perfectly. That our mortality is always upon us, Horace argues, is not an invitation to recklessness nor a counsel of despair, but a call to cherish while we still can the deepest values of life: companionship, happiness and love. If something stands between you and those things, remove it. And don’t do so tomorrow, but today.
