Headlines which constantly remind us of lethal crime heighten the sense of life’s fragility in all of us. Which of us has not heard gunshots in the distance and surmised a death or more? Over the years gunfire has been so close to a number of my friends that they have ducked to safety in their homes. The violence, though it has considerably eased, has not been a rumour far away.
But, after all, the brutal violence of bandits contributes only a small, though psychologically terrifying, part of life’s fragility. Cars driven dangerously or too fast or drunkenly cause more deaths than bandits do. And every day death comes calling in all of nature’s ordinary, ruthless ways. At school the epistles and odes of the great Roman poet, Quintus Horatius Flaccus, more commonly known as Horace, were drummed into me:
Omnem crede diem tibi diluxisse supremum. Grata superveniet quae non sperabitur hora. (Hold for yourself the belief that each day that dawns is your last: the hour to which you do not look forward will be a pleasant surprise).
Quid sit futurum cras fuge quaerere et quem fors dierum cumque dabit lucro appone. (What shall be tomorrow, think not of asking. Each day that Fortune gives you, be it what it may, set down for gain).
At Queens Royal College in Port-of-Spain, where I went to school countless years ago, we had a Latin teacher named Achilles Daunt who loved the poetry of Horace almost as much as he loved the poetry of Horace’s good friend, Virgil. I can see old Mr Daunt now, his baggy white trousers held up by a black belt, his egg-stained white jacket, his pallid moon-face with a patch of moustache looking as if it was clipped on, his untied shoe-laces, pacing up and down passionately declaiming Horace:
Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas:
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
(Even while we speak, Time, the churl, will have been running. Snatch the sleeve of today and trust as little as you may to tomorrow.)
Achilles Daunt quoted this verse from the Odes as a lesson, so he pretended anyway, which gave disgracefully wrong advice to us boys: we should always think ahead, plan fruitfully, think of the contribution we would make in the future by doing well at school and pursuing worthy careers afterwards. Horace’s advice was for spendthrifts and losers and happy-go-lucky types which he was sure we were not.
I am pretty sure he spoke with tongue in cheek. At any rate I know we boys thought in the heart of our hearts that Horace’s Carpe diem advice caught the truth of what should matter profoundly in life. “Seize the day,” make the most of every hour we have of life – in work, in games, in love, in friendships, in enjoyment of the cornucopia of the world – because that hour is all you have and, in truth, the future never comes.
A remarkable man, John Barnie, poet, author of fifteen fine books, then editor of the excellent magazine Planet in Wales, guitar player in a band called the Bad Boys, once visited to help judge the Guyana Prize for Literature. One evening he gave a reading of some of his poems at the National Library. One of the poems was called The Sun Is Shining and I imagined it directed at someone like myself, getting old and weary, who may have started to forget my old teacher Dauntissimus all those years ago pacing up and down declaiming the great verse, started to forget my Horace, started to forget the importance of seizing the day “until the last shade falls.”
Get the old men up,
no sleeping in chairs, out
to the bluebell wood
and the thin shimmer of its
scent; get them up, no
shuffling in slippers to the
kitchen to glance at the clock;
get them up, the buzzard
in a deft swoop grapples
the rabbit; life never is past
tense (the photograph
album is memory’s arthritis); get them up.
