Carpe Diem Regained

by Roman Krznaric

  9 Inglehart and Welzel 2005, 135–145; http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp?CMSID=Findings

  10 Quoted in Cooper (2013, 44).

  11 http://legacy.fordham.edu/halsall/basis/bede-book2.asp

  12 Laing 1967, 37.

  13 On the reception of Horace in the Renaissance see McGann (2007, 305–317).

  14 Horace 2000, 34.

  15 Smith-Laing, Whalen and Krznaric 2015.

  16 http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/dead_poets_final.html

  17 Horace 2000, 145.

  18 Earlier examples of carpe diem poetry include Shakespeare’s ‘O Mistress Mine, Where Are You Roaming’, from Twelfth Night, and Lorenzo de’ Medici’s ‘Trionfo’, which begins, ‘Youth is sweet and well/But doth speed away!/Let who will be gay,/To-morrow, none can tell’. http://www.elfinspell.com/MediciPoem.html

  19 Anderson 1992, 115–122; Lill 1997, 109–110; Moldenhauer 1968, 189, 204.

  20 McMahon 2006, 70-74; Eyres 2013, 181–193; Grimm 1963, 316–317.

  21 This figure is based on data from 2005 to 2015 (Smith-Laing, Whalen and Krznaric 2015).

  22 Ehrenreich 2006, 92, 97–117.

  23 See, for example, the speech by the Marquis of Lansdown in the House of Lords on February 3rd, 1795, Parliamentary Register, p.533. Analysis based on Google Ngram word search, and Smith-Laing, Whalen and Krznaric (2015).

  24 The Times, November 7th, 1933.

  25 http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/china/sfeature/nixon.html. Nixon claimed to be quoting a poem by Mao, but his words contained an uncanny echo of Horace. He used the phrase ‘seize the moment’ before his visit to China, and it even became the title for one of his books. See also William Safire’s analysis of the changing political usage of Horace’s carpe diem in the New York Times, December 24th, 2000.

  26 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZsy8YYRQxc

  2

  Dancing with Death

  I am sitting in a tiny, sparse stone hut at the top of a North Devon cliff, overlooking the sea, engulfed in swirls of wind and rain. Outside is an enticing sign: ‘Ronald Duncan’s Writing Hut is Open’. This is where the West Country poet and playwright – best known for writing the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera The Rape of Lucretia – used to spend his working days. His former home, West Mill, where I am currently staying, is just down the steep coastal path.

  Leafing through his autobiography, All Men Are Islands, I realise that what interests me about Duncan is not his literary friendships with people like T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound and Gerald Brennan, but his adventurous streak and voracious appetite for living. After leaving Cambridge in the early 1930s, he pawned his clothes, bought himself a second-hand coat and slouch hat, then trudged across the slag heaps of Chesterfield in search of work in a coal mine. Being mistaken for a gypsy due to his dark complexion, and claiming he had worked with horses in a circus, Duncan landed himself a job looking after thirty-five pit ponies at the bottom of a shaft. This month-long immersion in working-class life – reminiscent of George Orwell’s excursions ‘down and out’ on the streets of East London – was an unusual escapade for a budding aesthete descended from wealthy Austro-German aristocrats.

  Duncan then set off for India, where he lived on an ashram with Gandhi. During World War Two, this experience not only inspired him to become a conscientious objector, but to conduct an experiment in utopian living, running his farm at West Mill as a commune. Unfortunately several of the poets and pacifists who joined him were more interested in writing verse and squabbling than milking cows, and the venture faded into failure. Despite this, it was emblematic of Duncan’s efforts to take action rather than merely pontificate about his political ideals.

  What really motivated Ronald Duncan? What was at the psychological root of his being? I find the answer buried in the middle of his book, where he spells out his philosophy of life – or rather death. It is one of the most evocative descriptions I have ever read of what it can mean to seize the day:

  I was, and am, acutely aware that life is ephemeral, limited and brief. I never wake up in the morning without being surprised at being alive: I never go to sleep without wondering whether I shall wake up. Death to me was the reality. Yet everybody I met and saw seemed unaware of it. They seemed to live as if they would live for ever. How else could they spend forty years marking exercise-books, going to an office to earn the money which would enable them to go on going to an office to earn the money which would enable them to –. I could see a skull beneath every bowler hat… I was obsessed with the feeling that I was a small boat floating on an ocean, and the ocean was death.1

  As I sit in Duncan’s former cliff-top writing hut, making notes on this passage, there is a sudden knock at the door. A woman in sensible walking shoes peers inside and sees me at the old desk with my fingers poised on my laptop, staring out across the Atlantic. She looks me up and down and asks, hesitantly, ‘Are you Ronald Duncan?’

  I’m not. And neither are most people, in the sense that relatively few of us feel such a daily proximity to death, and such an affinity with it. Yet recognising the ephemeral nature of existence, and being able to look death in the eye or float on its ocean, is perhaps the most crucial ingredient of carpe diem living. Some people – like Ronald Duncan – appear to be born with this capacity for death awareness, or may have absorbed it from their religious education, as is the case with many Catholics and Buddhists. Others, however, have to make a conscious effort to bring the reality of mortality into their minds, so it can spur them to wake up and grasp the possibilities of life. As Albert Camus scribbled in one of his notebooks, ‘Come to terms with death. Thereafter anything is possible.’2

  The challenge is that both the human psyche, and the societies we live in, do their very best to shield us from thinking about death. So in this chapter, with some help from a Californian tech entrepreneur, a bored Japanese bureaucrat and a Russian social climber, I want to explore how we can bring death closer to our lives so it can stir us to seize the day. Over the centuries, humankind has invented a number of ways to do this, which take the form of imaginative thought experiments that I call ‘death tasters’, serving to remind us of our mortality. Some of them, such as the Stoic maxim ‘live each day as if it were your last’, should be approached with caution. But there are lesser-known alternatives that we ought to recognise as ingenious mental devices to ensure that we don’t reach the end of our days burdened by the ultimate regret: that we have wasted our lives and lived in vain. Before revealing them, however, it is essential to understand how death denial surreptitiously colonises our minds.

  WHEN DEATH BURNS THE LIPS

  Given that the one certitude of life is our inevitable death, it is curious that we don’t dedicate more of our time to seizing the day. It is extraordinary that we are willing to give over so many hours to watching television, flicking idly through Facebook updates, following random web links to videos of cats turning on light switches, keeping up with celebrity gossip, or just generally mooching about in our dressing gowns. Think of those who died tragically young – a budding teenager destroyed by leukaemia, a talented ballet dancer killed in a car accident – and how much they would give to be granted just one extra day of being alive. Don’t we owe it to them to make more of the precious gift of human existence?

  Then again, maybe we should not be surprised by how easy it is to put carpe diem on the existential backburner. Most cultures today have lost the preoccupation with death that was so prevalent in medieval and Renaissance societies, when church walls were covered with frescoes of dancing skeletons, and people kept human skulls on their desks – known as memento mori, Latin for ‘remember you must die’ – as a reminder that death could take them at any moment. It was an age of deadly plagues, shocking child mortality and endemic violence for which we should hardly be nostalgic. At the same time, knowing that their mortal existence might be only the briefest of candles propelled people to live with a passion and intensity that we no longer possess – ev
ident, for instance, in pre-industrial Europe’s vibrant carnival tradition. That is why the historian of death Philippe Ariès concluded, ‘the truth is that at no time has man so loved life as he did at the end of the Middle Ages’.3

  Modern society, by contrast, is geared to distract us from death. Advertising creates a world where everyone is forever young. We shunt the elderly away in care homes, out of sight and mind. Dying in hospital, covered in tubes and wires, has eclipsed the old custom of dying at home, which is one of the reasons that children so rarely come face to face with death. The question ‘Are you afraid of dying?’ is hardly a favoured conversation topic on TV talk shows. Discussing death is not completely off the agenda: the dilemmas of euthanasia and palliative care are making their way into public debate, and there is a recent trend of Death Cafés in cities from Boston to Beijing, where people gather to ponder mortality and the meaning of life over tea and cake: since 2011 over 3000 meetings have taken place in more than thirty countries.4 But in general, death remains a topic as taboo as sex was during the Victorian era.

  ‘The word death is not pronounced in New York, in Paris, in London, because it burns the lips,’ wrote the Mexican poet and essayist Octavio Paz in the 1950s. ‘The Mexican, in contrast, is familiar with death, jokes about it, caresses it, sleeps with it, celebrates it; it is one of his favourite toys and his most steadfast love.’5 This was probably something of an exaggeration, even back then, but it is fascinating how some cultures display an openness about death that is absent in many others. When Mexico holds its annual Day of the Dead festival, families conduct all-night vigils by their relatives’ graves and children play with papier-mâché skeletons and eat Pan de Muerto – ‘dead bread’ in the shape of human bones. Go to an Irish wake or a New Orleans jazz funeral and you will also find vibrant and open attitudes toward death. This all contrasts with my own experience growing up in Australia. After my mother died of cancer when I was ten, she was barely spoken about in our family and I didn’t visit her grave for twenty years. The veil of silence around her death, and my personal struggle to engage with it, was the by-product of a culture that censors conversations about death and shuns public grieving.

  On a more subtle level, much of social life can be interpreted as an elaborate means of shielding us from our inherent anxiety about death. I spoke about this with psychologist Sheldon Solomon, who has spent three decades researching how fear of mortality motivates an extraordinary amount of our everyday behaviour, even if we don’t consciously think about death that often:

  Literally hundreds of experiments have shown that when people are reminded of their mortality – such as by being interviewed in front of a funeral parlour or having the word ‘death’ flash on a computer screen so fast that they cannot see it – they respond by behaving in ways that bolster faith in their cultural worldviews and fortify their self-esteem. For example, after being reminded of death, materialistic people become more interested in owning high status luxury items like fancy cars and watches, and people who derive self-esteem from their personal appearance report that they intend to spend more time in a tanning booth and use less powerful sunscreen at the beach.6

  Other studies by Solomon and his colleagues show that the more people think about death, the more likely they are to want to have children, and people who are obsessive compulsive wash their hands more often when presented with death prompts. Their findings have profound implications, suggesting that so much of what we do and what we strive for – such as social status and career success – are at the deepest level ways of protecting us from our existential fears and keeping the spectre of death at bay.7 As the psychiatrist Irvin Yalom writes, ‘The terror of death is ubiquitous and of such magnitude that a considerable portion of one’s life energy is consumed in the denial of death.’8

  Religion remains the most common way of confronting this terror. Belief in the afterlife and the immortality of the soul helps many to override the fear of everything coming to an abrupt end upon drawing their final earthly breath. Christianity, Judaism and Islam have all developed alluring visions of everlasting existence in a heavenly Paradise as a reward for the devout, while Buddhism, Hinduism and other faiths offer reincarnation as an alternative means of understanding and coming to terms with death. Such doctrines have millions of adherents: three-quarters of Americans, for instance, believe in heaven and an afterlife.9 Those who lack faith can now turn to science instead: for $80,000 you can have your brain frozen, with the hope that in future decades or centuries molecular nanotechnology will come to your rescue and bring you back to life.10

  Few people would openly admit that their lives are driven by a fear of death. Yet the prospect of death is always on our minds, if not always on our lips. We may have to live through the death of a parent or close friend, we worry that our children might get hit by a car, or we face personal health scares. Our impending mortality can even become disconcertingly real when we look in the mirror and suddenly see ourselves ageing (that shocking first grey hair, the deepening wrinkles), or notice that we can no longer walk up a hill without pausing to catch our breath. Moreover, while around 70% of people claim they are not afraid of dying, our dreams are suffused with images and symbols of death. Studies reveal that close to one-third of all dreams contain overt anxiety about death, and that dreaming of death is most pronounced amongst those whose conscious death anxiety is either very high or very low.11 The nightmare of death haunts us like nothing else, even when we try to deny it.

  When it comes to thinking about our own deaths, most people live in a twilight between knowing and not wanting to know. Like the Sword of Damocles, death hangs in the air ready to pierce us. But allowing this thought to inhabit our minds is simply too much for our psyches to bear. So we bury it, we deny it, we distract ourselves with the challenges and joys of everyday living or the solace of religion. Yet in doing so, we may rob ourselves of the most exquisite existential elixir: a taste of death that inspires us, or even compels us, to make the most of the limited time we’ve got before the Grim Reaper takes us away to heaven, hell or oblivion.

  This leaves us with a delicate task: to bring the reality of death close enough to wet our lips without burning them. We need to become like the young woman in Gustav Klimt’s 1916 painting Death and Life who seems willing to stare death in the face with her eyes wide open, apparently unperturbed. She, alone amongst the other figures, has the courage to begin a dance with death.12 The question is how to think about our mortality in ways that open us to seizing the day. For this we can turn to an intriguing range of carpe diem thought experiments, or death tasters, which have emerged over the past 2,000 years. We will begin our journey by exploring the best-known – yet perhaps the most flawed – of them all: to live each day as if it were our last.

  SHOULD WE LIVE EACH DAY AS IF IT WERE OUR LAST – OR OUR FIRST?

  Generations of scholars and sages have meditated upon death and the shortness of life, from the ancient Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu to the medieval theologian the Venerable Bede, from the Renaissance essayist Michel de Montaigne to the anthropologist Ernest Becker. One of the most recent figures on the scene – arguably a sage of the digital age – is Steve Jobs.

  In 2005, the Apple founder gave a commencement speech at Stanford University that rapidly went viral on YouTube under the title ‘How to Live Before You Die’. Jobs spoke about being diagnosed with a rare form of pancreatic cancer a year earlier. Having survived this near-death experience (in fact, a relapse of the cancer took his life in 2011), he told the audience, ‘Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life.’ The prospect of death not only makes our everyday fears and embarrassments fall away into insignificance, but can propel us to follow our dreams and intuition, to take risks, and defy convention. ‘Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life,’ Jobs advised the students. He also offered them a handy maxim for the art of living:

&n
bsp; When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: ‘If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.’ It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: ‘If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?’ And whenever the answer has been ‘No’ for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.13

  Without ever using the phrase ‘seize the day’ itself, Jobs was expounding a carpe diem philosophy of life that has echoed through the centuries. Two millennia earlier, the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius pronounced that ‘perfection of character is this: to live each day as if it were your last, without frenzy, without apathy, without pretence’.14 Similarly, another Stoic thinker, the philosopher Seneca – born just a few years after Horace’s death – lamented that so many people squander their lives on wine and lust, greed and ambition. The problem, he wrote, ‘is not that we have a short space of time, but that we waste so much of it… there is nothing the busy man is less busy with than living’. The wise man, by contrast, ‘plans out every day as if it were his last’.15

  What is the underlying message of ‘live each day as if it were your last’? For a start, it shouldn’t be taken too literally. The point is not to act as if we have no future whatsoever, running around as if there’s only twenty-four hours left on our personal clock. Steve Jobs isn’t saying that we shouldn’t plan for our retirement or bother to have children. Rather, for him it’s about retaining the big perspective that we don’t live forever and should focus on doing what really matters, staying true to our values and personal vision. We can think about it as an existential check-in. For the Stoics, the emphasis is slightly different: it’s more about appreciating each day to its fullest. As the philosopher William Irvine writes, ‘when the Stoics live each day as if it is their last, it is not because they plan to take steps to make it their last; rather, it is so they can extract the full value of that day.’16