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Carpe Diem, Making the Most of Time, and a Few Dead Poets

“We are food for worms, lads,” announces John Keating, the unorthodox English teacher played by Robin Williams in the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. “Believe it or not,” he tells his students, “each and every one of us in this room is one day going to stop breathing, turn cold, and die.”

The rallying cry of their classroom is “carpe diem,” popularized as “seize the day,” although more literally translated as “pluck the day,” referring to the gathering of moments like flowers, suggesting the ephemeral quality of life, as in Robert Herrick’s “To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time,” which begs readers to live life to its full potential, singing of the fleeting nature of life itself:

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
  Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
  Tomorrow will be dying.

The Latin phrase carpe diem originated in the “Odes,” a long series of poems composed by the Roman poet Horace in 65 B.C.E., in which he writes:

Scale back your long hopes
to a short period. While we
speak, time is envious and
is running away from us.
Seize the day, trusting
little in the future.

Great Carpe Diem Links Here.

In the following commercial for Union Bank of Switzerland, the English actor Alan Bates recites Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken,” a poem that combines the idea of carpe diem with Thoreau’s idea of marching to the beat of a different drummer.

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Some other examples of carpe diem poems include:

“We live in deeds” by Philip James Bailey
“The City” by C. P. Cavafy
“Are they Shadows that we See” by Samuel Daniel
“Vitae Summa Brevis Spem Nos Vetat Incohare Longam” by Ernest Dowson
“The Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost
“Youth’s the Season Made for Joys” by John Gay
“Loveliest of Trees” by A. E. Housman
“A Psalm of Life” by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
“O mistress mine, where are you roaming?” from Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare
“Nic Dwa Razy (Nothing Twice)” by Wislawa Szymborska, translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh
“Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota” by James Wright

Predicting iPad Sales

I’m still deciding if I want to get an Apple iPad, despite how useful it would be for reading books and newspapers. It will certainly be a big improvement over the iPod Touch and Kindle devices I’m currently using. So why the hesitation? My primary concern is that more companies have to get behind this thing before I make a commitment. Right now that isn’t happening. Yet the number of reported pre-orders of the iPad indicate it could be a smashing success.

F. Scott Fitzgerald – This Side of Paradise

This Side of Paradise (Modern Library Classics)

Susan Orlean (Introduction). Modern Library 2001, Paperback, 352 pages, $0.82

Listen to the entire book by clicking the player below. To advance to the next chapter, click the double right arrow.

This Side of Paradise is the debut novel of F. Scott Fitzgerald. Published in 1920, and taking its title from a line of the Rupert Brooke poem Tiare Tahiti, the book examines the lives and morality of post-World War I youth. Its protagonist, Amory Blaine, is a wealthy and attractive Princeton University student who dabbles in literature and has a series of romances that eventually lead to his disillusionment. In his later novels, Fitzgerald would further develop the book’s theme of love warped by greed and status-seeking.

Amory Blaine grows up in a wealthy family and is given an Ivy League education. Without a need to learn a profession, he chiefly dabbles in literature and partying. His school chums are of the same ilk, and they act as foils for their ideas as Amory begins to think of himself as a character in the aforementioned Rupert Brooke poem.

World War I intervenes in this happy fog and brings focus to some, doubt to others.

In the rapidly changing technology of the war era, the financial underpinnings of the Blaine fortune begin to fall apart. The deaths of Amory’s parents leave the finances without a rudder and as Amory’s situation deteriorates he comes to realize he has only his interest in literature to fall back upon.

Meanwhile, a series of young women traipse through his life, attracted to his handsome face and bright wit like moths to a candle. But Amory can never master the role of being a real person… and, one by one, the young women traipse out.

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia – G. K. Chesterton
• Zipped files to add to your iPod (174MB)

Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton

Listen to the entire book by clicking the player below. To advance to the next chapter, click the double right arrow.

Orthodoxy (1908) is a book by G. K. Chesterton that has become a classic of Christian apologetics. Chesterton considered this book a companion to his other work, Heretics. In the book’s preface Chesterton states the purpose is to “attempt an explanation, not of whether the Christian faith can be believed, but of how he personally has come to believe it.” In it, Chesterton presents an original view of Christian religion. He sees it as the answer to natural human needs, the “answer to a riddle” in his own words, and not simply as an arbitrary truth received from somewhere outside the boundaries of human experience.

The book is developed as an intellectual quest by a spiritually curious person. While looking for the meaning of life he finds truth that uniquely fulfills human needs. This is the truth revealed in Christianity. Chesterton likens this discovery to a man setting off from the south coast of England, journeying for many days, only to arrive at Brighton, the point he originally left from. Such a man, he proposes, would see the wondrous place he grew up in with newly appreciative eyes. This is a common theme in Chesterton’s works, and one which he gave fictional embodiment to in Manalive.

In keeping with this detachment from dogmatic religion, the book has few quotations from (although many allusions to) Scripture. It also lacks authoritative statements by religious authorities. To be sure, Chesterton is discussing the traditional orthodoxy, as contrasted with non-Christian ideas. He assumes his readers know its basic tenets well, as they are, he says, “sufficiently summarized in the Apostles’ Creed“. Chesterton is not investigating differences between Christians or details of their beliefs in a way that would require him to appeal to other authorities. Still, the book’s message is mostly presented as a free intellectual inquiry by an individual looking for an explanation to the mysteries of human existence that satisfies his own innate reason.

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia – G. K. Chesterton
• Live audio stream of entire book
• Zipped files to add to your iPod (174MB)

Ring Lardner and Baseball – You Know Me Al

Listen to the entire book by clicking the player below. To advance to the next chapter, click the double right arrow.

This time of year when many sports fans turn to baseball, my mind wanders to writers like Ring Lardner, who wrote about baseball during the game’s heyday. Oddly, I’ve never taught Ring Lardner, and now that I don’t teach American Literature, the odds are slim that I’ll be teaching him anytime soon. But the impulse remains: it’s time for a good baseball story, and what follows is one of the best — You Know Me Al.

Big, fat, dumb, lazy, vain, headstrong and cheap, Jack Keefe is a journeyman pitcher with the Chicago White Sox in the rowdy days of the Deadball Era, circa 1915, ruled by the likes of Ty Cobb and John McGraw. In You Know Me Al, we follow Jack Keefe’s life on-field and off, via the letters Jack writes to his old chum Al in his home town of Bedford, Indiana.

Ring Lardner was a Chicago sportswriter who covered the White Sox, and he brought an insider’s knowledge of clubhouse life together with his biting wit and gift for the vernacular to create a comic gem in You Know Me Al. The six Jack Keefe stories that compose this volume were originally written as individual magazine articles, but the epistolary format made it easy to collect them into a single running narrative covering Jack’s first two years in the Big Leagues.

It isn’t necessary to know baseball history to enjoy the book, which is as much about Jack’s troubles with girlfriends, wives and babies as it is about the Chicago White Sox. For the baseball fan, however, this glimpse into a bygone era adds an extra layer of fascination. In any case, Lardner’s portrait of the professional ballplayer as a dumb, drunken narcissist is as funny today as the day it was written. (Summary by Rick Rodstrom)

• Gutenberg e-text
• Wikipedia – Ring Lardner
• Live audio stream of entire book
• Zipped files to add to your iPod (141MB)

First post from iPod Touch

I downloaded this amazing Wordpress app that enables me to update this blog from the comfort of my couch. Not bad, especially since I’m trying to spend less time in front of the computer. I can also post pix with this app, but I’ll have to fool around with it a bit before I get the hang of it.

Possible Topics for “Mid-Term Break”

Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” offers many possible topics to write a paragraph about.

By Friday my seniors will have to annotate Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break” as well as write an insightful paragraph about it. Writing about poetry is not easy for them, so to get them ready, to sort of grease the wheels, we did a little brainstorming for possible topics. The above photo shows what my whiteboard looks like after such a brainstorming session.

Mid-Term Break

What my whiteboard looks like after we get done discussing possilbe meanings of the title of Seamus Heaney’s “Mid-Term Break.”

In my class the whiteboard is becoming more an essential tool for thought, helping us to capture what we think and challenging us to explain why we think it. For example, today my seniors read “Mid-Term Break” by Seamus Heaney as their poem of the week. In both periods we discussed the possible meanings of the title, which at first seems not at all related to the topic of a young boy who’s killed in an accident. But after scratching away at the surfaces, we began to see the title as rich in nuance and hidden meanings. The connotations of the three words almost overwhelm the poem itself. I wrote our brainstorming on the whiteboard and took a snapshot with my old digital camera.