Carpe Diem
For Humanities 305 Freshmen
Oct. 29, 1996
Carpe Diem
By Wayne Danielson
A few years ago, I went to visit my sister Dee, who lives in Phoenix.
You know, it’s a good thing to have brothers and sisters. Other people may tell you you’re doing fine even when you’re not, but brothers and sisters always tell you exactly what you’re doing wrong.
I have a problem with people being polite to me. I’m not sure what it is about me, but people are generally very respectful. I’m not sure why. Maybe it’s because of my white hair. I seem to inspire a certain dread. Even my children seem to me to be reluctant these days to tell me when I go astray.
But not my brother and my sisters. I get no respect from them at all.
If they don’t like my haircut, they’ll tell me right out, “Wayne you look like a bum.”
If my suit is the wrong color, they’ll tell me right away. “It makes your face look all muddy.”
If my coat needs pressing, they’ll say, “Why do you always look permanently wrinkled?”
Are your brothers and sisters like that?
I thought so.
Brothers and sisters really know how to get to us, don’t they?
Since I had been running several quarts low on constructive criticism, it was good for me to spend some time with my sister Dee in Phoenix. She is older than I am, and she has always been very direct with me. She gives me advice on exactly what I ought to do to improve my attitude.
On the first night of my visit, she told me that she thought I was an exceptional person, and I could do anything I wanted to do with the rest of my life, so why didn’t I get busy and do it? She said she was tired of watching me loaf when I ought to be busy writing books.
Okay, I thought. I didn’t really believe that, except for the exceptional part, of course. I’ve always thought of myself as being No. 1 in that department. But I had been busy. I had been as busy as anyone could possibly be. Where was all this time coming from to write books? I nodded politely and tried to ignore what she was telling me.
The next day she told me she didn’t much like my rotund shape. She figured I had been eating improperly, and she insisted that I start immediately on a liquid diet. I had been looking forward to pigging out on some good southwestern food in Phoenix, but no luck — for the rest of my visit all I would get was Slim-Fast, a kind of brown slime you buy at the supermarket. It does cause you to lose weight because after a few days of drinking it, the very thought of food makes your stomach turn. But it was all right. My sister said I needed to diet, to change my attitude toward food. And I trusted her — more or less.
The third day, she gave me a whole list of things to do to make me a better person. She said I should put the list up on the refrigerator door when I got home so I wouldn’t forget. Here are a few of the things on the list:
(1) Take care of yourself. (Well, I always try to do that.)
(2) Stay on your diet. (Well, I promised, but I had already discovered that after a can of Slim-Fast a couple of Butterfingers go great.)
(3) Be cheerful and helpful. ( I would try, but I didn’t have my sister’s skills at doing that.)
(4) Listen more and talk less. (That was beginning to cut pretty deep, Sis.)
(5) Don’t give advice. (That’s going too far, and how about you, for heaven’s sake?)
(6) Try to love somebody this year that you didn’t love last year. (That, my dear, is none of your business.)
As a clincher for her campaign, on the last night of my visit, Dee rented the movie, “The Dead Poet’s Society.” I’m sure you’ve seen it. It’s a modern day Mr. Chips story about a teacher in a boys’ prep school back east. Robin Williams is an English teacher, and, if you can swallow that, the rest of the movie is pretty good, though it has a sad ending.
The point of the movie — which is why my sister rented it and made me watch it, I’m sure — is that education is not just for making a living, but for making a life. That is, education is not just about knowledge and skills; it’s about feelings and attitudes and character. And good teachers, like good brothers and sisters, have a kind of responsibility for inspiring their students to improve themselves, in all ways, in their entire approach to life. Dee was a good teacher herself, and she wanted me to go home and be one, too.
In the movie, Robin Williams uses a famous quotation from the Roman poet Horace — that’s Quintus Horatius Flaccus — who lived from 65 B.C. to 8 B.C.
“Carpe diem,” Williams shouts at his students in a kind of exaltation. “Carpe diem. Seize the day.”
Carpe diem is the ancient poet’s advice to us not to live in the past or the future — as I am inclined to do — but to live today, to live now, to get everything out of the present moment that it has to offer.
When I got back from Phoenix, I took the time to look up the complete quotation. This is how it goes, for those of you who remember your high school Latin:
Dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas:
Carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero.
Roughly translated — and roughly is all I am capable of — it says:
While we are talking, time is slipping away:
Seize the day, and don’t count on the future for anything.
How Roman, I thought. Unlike the Greeks, who were ambitious, literary, athletic, logical, interested in science and philosophy and drama and music and dance and everything else, the Romans were businessmen — engineers, practical men of affairs, merchants — ruthless, militaristic, legalistic, concerned with acquiring great wealth and living the good life in the country, lording it over a bunch of Greeks. Come to think of it, the Romans were a lot like Americans. They were the Yuppies of their time, concerned with keeping up with the Flaccuses. I can imagine that they would like that line from Horace — seize the day, make that buck, flog that underling!
I didn’t much care for Horace’s advice.
As a matter of fact, he sounded a lot like my sister Dee.
And yet, and yet.
When I thought about my sister’s advice, and when I thought about that dead poet, Horace, I began to wonder. When I really thought about my life, and what I had done so far, and the many things that remained to be done, the line bothered me. How often have I just talked about problems and never taken any action, never done anything?
More often than I cared to remember, I realized.
There was that beautiful girl in my high school journalism class. I wanted to ask her out on a date. I thought about her a lot. I dreamed about her. I imagined where we would go to eat, and where we would drive later, and well — in my usual thorough and thoughtful way — I thought about all the possibilities. But what happened? I never quite got around to taking that first step, making that call, asking that essential question, “Would you like to go out to dinner and the movies with me Saturday night?” And she took up with a half-back on the football team who wasn’t so reluctant to ask questions, I suppose, and that was the end of that.
Carpe diem.
Then there was that job offer on a small newspaper in California. It promised great experience — doing everything there was to do on a newspaper. But it was in Watsonville, the absolute middle of the lettuce fields. Absolute nowhere, in my books. Did I really want to go to Watsonville? Nothing ever happened in Watsonville. About the most exciting thing in Watsonville was watching the train come through every day about noon. That and listening to the lettuce grow. I thought about it and thought about it. And before I finished thinking, they gave the job to somebody else. And the very next year, he covered a story about labor unrest in the lettuce fields and won the Pulitzer Prize.
Carpe diem.
There was that economic opportunity. My days as a reporter in another California town brought me into contact with different cultures, different music, different foods. One thing I really enjoyed being served in California homes was a crispy, salady dish that was new to me. “What is this?” I wanted to know. They called it tacos. “Say,” I thought, “Tacos are better than hamburgers. I wonder if you could make tacos and sell them to people the way they sell Big Macs at MacDonald’s?” I thought about this idea a lot. I even talked to a friend who was a banker and asked him whether he thought we could get money to open a franchise. He supposed that we could. It was a really good idea, but before I finished thinking about it, one by one, all over America, the first Taco Bells began to open their doors.
Carpe diem.
What a jerk, you must be thinking. What a dork. What a loser.
You know, you sound a lot like my sister.
But my whole life has not been like that, as a matter of fact.
Early in my academic life, John Carr, the director of the Computation Center at the University of North Carolina, came by my office one Friday afternoon. “Hey, Wayne, ” he said, “Did you know our computer is now large enough to hold the contents of an entire newspaper?”
“No,” I said, “I didn’t know that. How remarkable.”
But inside I was saying, “Why would anybody want to put the contents of a newspaper in a computer? It doesn’t make any sense.”
But off and on, in between the household chores that took up so much of my time on that long weekend, I thought about what John Carr had said. And by Monday morning, I had decided that putting newspaper content in the computer was an interesting idea that made a lot of sense. And furthermore, I was going to be the one to do it. And so, at the University of North Carolina in the early 1960s, we were among the first to show that computers could be used to input news stories, to edit them by inserting and deleting letters and words, and to print them out in columns, hyphenated and justified, just the way you found them in your daily newspaper.
That weekend decision caused a great deal of trouble in my life. Newspaper production methods hadn’t changed much in the preceding 100 years. People in the profession were outraged at my even suggesting that computers could help edit and produce a newspaper. A reporter from Dubuque wrote a letter to Editor and Publisher, the bible of the industry. The letter went something like this:
So, a journalism professor at the University of North Carolina thinks a computer can help edit a newspaper. Well, I’m building a computer in my basement. I’m making it out of an old typewriter, a broken toaster, and a
switch for a three-way light bulb. It won’t be very good. But it will be good enough to replace a journalism professor who thinks that computers will ever have anything to do with producing the American newspaper.
I happened to be right, and he happened to be wrong. Right on schedule, the computer revolution in communication would go forward. And, in one way or another, the rest of my academic career would be tied to that revolution.
Carpe diem.
It was the early 1990s at the University of Texas at Austin. Families increasingly expected their children to graduate from the University knowing lots about computer technology. The colleges and schools had elaborate plans for what they wanted to do to help students learn about the future. But funds were scarce and getting scarcer. The gap between what our students knew and what students from other colleges knew was wide and getting wider. An idea surfaced in the Faculty Computer Committee. Could we ask the students to help? Would UT students and their families be willing to pay a technology fee to help bring the University’s teaching into line with the needs of the contemporary world? Nobody knew for sure.
“Could we please ask and find out?” our committee wrote to the incoming president, Robert Berdahl.
“Let’s do that,” he said.
And today, because UT students recognized the need that was there, and because we took action, and because the president and the Board of Regents were willing to support us, the University has $7 million a year to improve teaching through technology. We’re not where we should be yet, but we are on the way.
Carpe diem.
A certain rotund, gray-haired professor had lost his wife to heart disease. He moped around the campus for several years, a burden to his students, his fellow teachers and his friends, who seemed unable to rouse him from his lethargy and get him moving again. Even his sister, who lived in Phoenix, couldn’t overcome his dreadful inertia. Finally, a colleague managed to get him to agree to attend an Austin group of professional people, all single, who met socially once a month. Reluctantly, he agreed to go as a guest. At the first meeting, a former student introduced him to a young school teacher who said she was really interested in computers. Later, he thought about that teacher a lot. He thought about how he might ask her to go out sometime. Would she say yes? She probably wouldn’t be interested. She probably just wanted to talk to him about technology. Maybe he shouldn’t even think about it. Nevertheless, he got himself invited to a second meeting. It was a Country Western party, and he dressed in blue jeans and boots that made him an inch taller, and a couple of times during the evening he talked with her in what he hoped sounded like a country drawl. Just as everyone was getting ready to go home he found himself standing next to her in line at the cloak room. It was decision time. “Uh,” he said, “I understand the wildflowers are beautiful right now. Would you — would you like to go for a drive with me tomorrow to look at them?”
She looked at him for quite a while.
“Okay,” she said.
They found they had a lot to talk about. Indeed they have been talking constantly since they got married a year ago in July.
Carpe diem
My young friends, let me speak to you just as my sister Dee would if she were here today. You are gifted. You are bright. You are among the top students at one of the great universities of the nation. You are in the process of getting a wonderful education. You are well organized. You are extremely capable. You can do many things. You are talented. And, whether you realize it or not, you have the freedom to do whatever you want to do. You are young. You have the energy and insight you need. You have the knowledge. You have the opportunity. You can do something fine and great with your lives. Furthermore, whether you know it or not, people are waiting to help you. People are always waiting to help those who have ideas and have a plan for making them come true and have the determination to act.
Will you act? — that is the question.
Or will you be hung up on the baggage you have brought along with you from the past? Will you spend your days and nights chewing over old hurts, old wounds, old defeats, old opportunities that you let slip away?
Will you act? — that is the question.
Or will you be firmly lodged in the future? Will you spend your time in some misty, romantic, improbable by-and-by when everything will fall into place and magically happen without your having to do anything? Will you spend your life waiting for Prince Charming or Princess Charmaine to come riding by bearing the winning lottery ticket just for you?
Will you act? — that is the question.
Will you “seize the day,” as the poet Horace put it so long ago? Will you take action today to see that your dreams come true. Will you write that story? Will you paint that picture? Will you follow up that remarkable hunch you had in the lab last week? Will you start that business that you know will succeed? Will you you build that dream house? Will you begin that career in politics, in engineering, in business, in music? Will you call up and ask for that totally impossible, unbelievable date? Will you confidently, with good will and good humor, go for it?
Will you carpe diem? Will you seize the day?
I hope that you will. And so does my sister Dee.
