Take Five

white wine with roses

December 17, 2014
More Wine and Roses

I asked Tom Nashe why in his translation of Horace (TA: December 10, 2014), he translated carpe diem not “seize” but “take the day.” Because, he said: “Seize suggests grab or grasp or take by force. I thought of take as in ‘take five,’ or when you come in to work under the weather, someone says, ‘Get out of here. Take a day, two if you need it.’ Take in that sense is about rest, recuperation, ease.”

          In Tom Hodgkinson’s The Idler, the arch-enemy is Thomas Edison. Here is what Hodgkinson has to say in part:

 Along with Benjamin Franklin, the . . . great American enemy of idleness was Thomas Edison, the inventor.  Born in 1847, he started work at 13 selling sweets and magazines to train travelers and spent his spare time reading books on science.  His love of money, machines and hard graft created the dynamic, wealthy, productive captain of industry he later became. 

     The great idlers of the time such as Oscar Wilde and Paul Lafargue had a vision of technology as freeing men from toil.  Wilde, in “The Soul of Man under Socialism,” wrote: “Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious and distressing.”  Lafargue in “the Right to Be Lazy,” wrote that “the machine is the savior of humanity, the god who shall redeem man from the sordidae artes and from working for hire, the god who shall give him leisure and liberty.”  Edison, on the other hand, saw technology as a tool to increase productivity and efficiency.  He used technology to enslave.  The fact that he is portrayed as a great man, a paragon of American industriousness, tells us much about the decay of Western civilization in its journey from art and life to work and death.

 One of the gentlest of carpe diem poems, Abraham Cowley’s “The Epicure,” calls for “taking” the day for, once again, “wine and roses,” but also treating it (the day) kindly, so it may at least wish to stay. It can't, of course, but this day is what we have until it has to go. Today is ours, Cowley says, but not to make money or mope around in – not for sorrow or busi-ness.  And as for tomorrow: let the gods have that; tomorrow can be theirs, if they leave us today.

              Fill the Bowl with rosie Wine,
              Around our temples Roses twine. 
              And let us cheerfully awhile, 
              Like the Wine and Roses smile. 
              Crown’d with Roses we contemn 
              Gyge’s wealthy Diadem. 
              To day is Ours; what do we fear? 
              To day is Ours; we have it here. 
              Let’s treat it kindly, that it may 
              Wish, at least, with us to stay. 
              Let’s banish Business, banish Sorrow; 
              To the Gods belongs To morrow.

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 Listen to Cowley's poem and Tom Nashe's translation of Horace's tu ne quaesieris, click here.