Dessert First
How the Modern Version of Carpe Diem Has Seized the Day
by Jonathan Carson
“Life Is Short: Eat Dessert First,” reads a T-shirt popular among college students. “Carpe Diem,” reads another, “Seize the Day,” as the words of Horace are usually translated. The first shirt gives the common understanding of the second. Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we are all dead. The authority of the Roman poet is invoked to justify, indeed glorify, adolescent self-indulgence.
Adolescents, especially adolescent boys, need no encouragement, of course, to choose instant gratification. Yet this is what they are getting from their English teachers. Elements of Literature, Sixth Course, a twelfth-grade textbook published by Holt, Rinehart and Winston, tells students that “Carpe diem . . . is a literary theme that urges living in the present moment, especially in pleasurable pursuits,” a theme that typically includes “descriptions of all the delights that await a hesitant young woman,” an “old poetic tradition” that extends to today’s music videos and songs on the radio. Carpe diem poems are suitable for “wild Roman parties.” Prentice-Hall says to students, “Many great literary works have been written with the carpe diem theme. All have in common the fact that they urge people to enjoy life in the present, while such enjoyment is possible.” Scott, Foresman says that carpe diem is “a theme frequently found in lyric poetry: enjoy life’s pleasures while you are able.” Harcourt Brace Jovanovich says that in a carpe diem poem, the “speaker tries to persuade an attractive person to take present advantage of youth and good looks and to give in to love [that is, sex] now, before time and age have taken their toll.” Carpe diem poems are “invitations to set aside traditional moral scruples.”
High-school textbook after high-school textbook says the same thing: great poetry teaches “the need to live for the moment,” as McDougal, Littell puts it, to “live for today,” according to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. And living for the moment means pleasure-seeking. Says Holt, Rinehart and Winston, “ Carpe diem is a call to live life to the fullest right now: ‘Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die,’ as the Roman poet Horace said.” After all, “even immoral behavior while alive is preferable to being good but dead.” Somehow dangerous drugs, dangerous sex, dangerous levels of blood alcohol, dangerous driving, and dangerous weapons prolong life, and virtuous behavior shortens it. From these premier educational publishers, there is no hint that seizing the day and living life to the fullest right now could mean bold, immediate action to fulfill one’s responsibilities to God and man.
College textbooks are no better and spread the same disinformation: “ Carpe diem poems encourage the snatching of the pleasures of the moment,” says St. Martin’s Press unsaintedly. Living for the moment equals living life to the fullest equals the seeking of pleasure, particularly sexual pleasure. Poets from Horace to Shakespeare and beyond have taught us to eat dessert first.
What people would do had they but a brief time left indicates what is most important to them. That the publishers identify carpe diem with eating, drinking, and being merry indicates that they believe that the most important thing in life is eating, drinking, and being merry. Worse, their assumption that others interpret carpe diem as an invitation to party shows that they cannot imagine people for whom the pursuit of base pleasures is not most important. Yet most people, if told they were going to die tomorrow, would try to put their affairs in order, would say good-bye to their loved ones, and would pray to God for mercy. It’s hard to imagine eating, drinking, and being merry in such a situation.
Now if it were true that Horace and the great poets of the English Renaissance advocated the pursuit of pleasure in response to aging and death, textbook publishers could be reproached with at most a failure to warn students that pleasure is not the same thing as happiness, which is the result of virtue. But it is not true. And finding out why it is not true means unlearning much of what we have been taught about English literature and learning how to fill the rest of our lives with glimpses of heaven.
“To the Virgins”
The preeminent example of those “great literary works . . . written with the carpe diem theme” is “To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time” by Robert Herrick, a seventeenth-century Anglican priest. Says Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, with the agreement of all the other textbook publishers, “The carpe diem theme is epitomized in a line from Robert Herrick’s ‘To the Virgins, To Make Much of Time’: ‘Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may.’” Because “To the Virgins” is indeed a great poem and one worth careful analysis, here it is in full:
Gather ye Rose-buds while ye may,
Old Time is still a-flying:
And this same flower that smiles to day,
To-morrow will be dying.
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