Carpe diem my friends

Drink your wine while ye may…

Public Toilet Soho

Since I looked up this phrase to jog my memory of the entire epigraph, here is the Wikipedia explanation.

Carpe diem is a phrase from a Latin poem by Horace.. It is popularly translated as “seize the day”. Carpe means “pick, pluck, pluck off, gather”, but Horace used the word to mean “enjoy, make use of”.

In Horace, the phrase is part of the longer Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero – “Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the future”, and the ode says that the future is unknowable, and that instead one should scale back one’s hopes to a brief future, and drink one’s wine. This phrase is usually understood against Horace’s Epicurean background. Related expressions Rabbinic phrase “And if not now, when?” (Pirkei Avoth 1:14)

(click to continue reading Carpe diem – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.)

Life is too short, too fragile, ends too suddenly to worry about petty annoyances, and self-imposed barriers to entry in the slipstream should be discarded with haste. There’s more to this tale, but there is no need to spell it out, is there?

Leave a Reply

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.