Carp diem
Carpe diem (quam minimum credula postero) is a Latin phrase extracted from a poem of Horace which usually is translated by “Picking the day present, by trusting you least possible the following day”.
Literally, this sentence means “Picking the day would be the least curious about the future”. It is drawn from towards Latin of the Poète interested by the epicureanism and the Stoïcisme Horace (in its Odes , I, 11,8 “In Leuconoé”). It summarizes the poem which precedes it and in which Horace seeks to persuade Leuconoé to benefit from the present moment and to draw all the benefit from them, without worrying neither about the day nor of the hour of its death.
Made famous near the general public since the Antiquity, the extract Carpe diem is the subject of a bad interpretation: translated by “Benefits from the day present” (whereas the two words mean “picking the day”), and understood like an incentive with the Hédonisme most extremely, perhaps more the blind man, it loses any relationship with the original text, which, on the contrary, encourages with well enjoying the present (without however challenging any discipline of life) in the idea that the future is dubious and that all has to disappear.
It is thus an hedonism of Ascèse, a search for pleasure ordered, reasoned, which must avoid any displeasure and any supremacy of the pleasure. It is an hedonism has minimum : it is a epicureanism (Horace belonged to these epicureans of the Roman era).
Symbolic system
One can bring closer it towards, become a maxim, of these words drawn from the same poem: Spatio brevi/Spem longam reseces , that is to say “Removes the long hope at your counted days” (literally “the durable hope with the short amount of time Cuts off”).The pink , quickly faded flower and that it is necessary to gather as of its Floraison, became a canonical Métaphore of the brevity of the human existence in the French Poésie of the 16th century, in particular with the poets of the Pléiade. Ronsard writes as follows: “Gather as of today the pinks of the life” in its Sonnets for Helene . The same topic will be taken again at the 17th century by the English poets Robert Herrick and Andrew Marvell.
Posterity
- the maxim Carpus Diem figure frequently on the sundials.
- Carpe diem (quam minimum credula postero) is quoted in the film the Circle of the missing poets .
- It is also the title of several songs and albums in particular signed Aldebert, Will Haven, Lara Fabian, Martyr. A French group of the years 1970 bears also this name.