With and Without Horace

From Gardner Wade Earle, 1949, Moments With (and Without) Horace (PDF Book).

Ode I.11, A Moment With Horace

Ask not what ends the gods have set for thee
Or me. Do not inquire the horoscope
From those who read the charts of famed Chaldee.

How better to accept today, and hope
This season may not be the last we hear
Wild Tuscan waves break on the coastal slope.

Show wisdom. Care for things that now appear —
There’s wine to filter; grain is ripe to cut —
Leave far-flung plans and take what’s lying near.

Yea, even while we speak, the door has shut
Upon a portion of the passing flow
Of that most precious gift to cherish, but

The present tense of Time is never slow!

Same Ode, Without Horace

When you have paid to get your horoscope
And wasted dough for “readings from the sky”
You’re simply clinchin’ that you are a dope.

There’s only one thing sure as babies cry —
And that’s today. You better take it now —
It may be all there is before y’ die.

Quit thinkin’ what you’ll do next year, and how.
The wine needs strainin’ and the oats are waitin’
And stuff you’ll use for this and next year’s chow.

And while I’m gabbin’ here and disputatin’,
You know what’s goin’ on for you and me?
The only thing we got ain’t hesitatin’ —

Our Time is flittin’ like a busy bee!

The Quest for the Things of This World

“The man who has given his heart entirely to the quest for the things of this world is always in a hurry, for he has but a limited time to find, possess, and enjoy them. The memory of life’s brevity constantly spurs him on. Beyond the goods he possesses, he is forever imagining a thousand others that death will prevent him from savoring unless he makes haste. This thought feels him with anxieties, fears, and regrets and keeps his soul in a state of constant trepidation that impels him again and again to change plans and places. If the taste for material well-being is coupled with a social state where neither law nor custom still keeps anyone in his place, this restlessness of spirit is further exacerbated. We will then find men constantly changing course for fear of missing the shortest road to happiness.” (Tocqueville, Democracy in America, tr. Goldhammer)

A Feeling of Tentativeness

“I am not really the helpless type, but I have never been very fond of the sort of aggressive scholarship that is now encountered everywhere, trying to sell to humanity brand-new laws of nature as if they were used cars. A feeling of tentativeness; an appreciation of the provisional and fragmentary character of human insight into nature; a consideration of how much arrogance and rashness must attend even the deepest understanding before generalizing statements can be made about life: all this will be part of the inheritance with which the many years have burdened the scientist as he grows older. If he is any good, he will become more modest.” (Erwin Chargaff, Heraclitean Fire)

Master Kung’s Gentleman

“Twenty-five hundred years ago Master Kung recognized clearly that it is the disorder of the language that produces the disorder of the state. It is written in The Analects of Confucius (Waley translation):

If language is incorrect, then what is said does not concord with what was meant; and if what is said does not concord with what was meant, what is to be done cannot be effected. If what is to be done cannot be effected, then rites and music will not flourish. If rites and music do not flourish, then punishments will go astray. And if punishments go astray, then the people have nowhere to put hand and foot. Therefore the gentleman uses only such language as is proper for speech, and only speaks of what it would be proper to carry into effect. The gentleman, in what he says, leaves nothing to mere chance.

I should be sorry if these words led to the conclusion that all that Master Kung’s gentleman lacked was a word processor.” (Erwin Chargaff, 1986, Serious Questions)

Eloquence

“Eloquence is the art of saying things in such a way (1) that those to whom we speak are able to hear them without pain and with pleasure; (2) that they feel their self-interest involved, so that self-love leads them the more willingly to think over what has been said. It consists, then, in a correspondence which we try to establish, on the one hand, between the head and the heart of those to whom we speak and, on the other, between the thoughts and the expressions that we use. This presupposes that we have studied the heart of man in order to know all its workings and that we find the right arrangement of the remarks that we wish to make suitable. We must put ourselves in the place of those who are to hear us, and try out on our own heart the appeal we make in what we say, so as to see whether the one is rightly made for the other, and whether we can feel confident that the hearer will be, as it were, forced to surrender. We ought to restrict ourselves, so far as possible, to the simple and natural, and not to magnify that which is small or diminish that which is great. It is not enough that a thing be beautiful; it must be suitable to the subject and there must be in it nothing excessive or lacking.” (Pascal, tr. Jacques Barzun, 2003)

To Be Surprised, To Wonder

“To be surprised, to wonder, is to begin to understand. This is the sport, the luxury, special to the intellectual man. The gesture characteristic of his tribe consists in looking at the world with eyes wide open in wonder. Everything in the world is strange and marvellous to well-open eyes. This faculty of wonder is the delight refused to your football ‘fan,’ and, on the other hand, is the one which leads the intellectual man through life in the perpetual ecstasy of the visionary. His special attribute is the wonder of the eyes. Hence it was that the ancients gave Minerva her owl, the bird with ever-dazzled eyes.” (Ortega y Gasset, 1930, The Revolt of the Masses)

Two Classes of Creatures

“For there is no doubt that the most radical division that is possible to make of humanity is that which splits it into two classes of creatures: those who make great demands on themselves, piling up difficulties and duties; and those who demand nothing special of themselves, but for whom to live is to be every moment what they already are, without imposing on themselves any effort towards perfection; mere buoys that float on the waves.” (Ortega y Gasset, 1930, The Revolt of the Masses)

Horace’s Vitas Hinnuleo

Translated by Edward Marsh, 1941:

You shun me, Chloe, like a fawn
That on the wild untrodden screes
Seeks her shy mother, startled if a breeze
Rustles among the trees;
For if the first faint shivering dawn
Of earliest spring
Sets the young leaves a-whispering,
Or the green lizards shake
A bramble in the brake,
She stands with knocking heart and trembling kees.

Yet no fierce tiger I, dear child,
No lion from the Libyan wild
In hot pursuit to seize
And crunch you — quit at last your mother’s side!
‘Tis time you were a bride.

Translated by J. S. Blake-Reed, 1944:

Even as the frightened fawn that flees
With fluttering heart and trembling knees,
O’er pathless hills and in the trees
The breeze doth hear, —

Seeking her anxious dam, doth quake
When winds of spring the branches shake
Or darting lizards stir the brake
And checks in fear; —

So, Chloe, you my footsteps fly;
But leave your mother; be not shy;
No ravening beast of prey am I
To eat you, dear.

Drop the Classics from Education?

“When science shall have assumed her true relation to the field of human culture we shall all be happier. To-day science knows that the silkworm must be fed on the leaves of the mulberry tree, but does not know that the soul of man must be fed on the Bible and the Greek classics. Science knows that a queen bee can be produced by care and feeding, but does not as yet know that every man who has had a little Greek and Latin in his youth belongs to a different species from the ignorant man. No matter how little it may have been, it reclassifies him. There is more kinship between that man and a great scholar than there is between the same man and some one who has had no classics at all: he breathes from a different part of his anatomy. Drop the classics from education? Ask rather, Why not drop education? For the classics are education. We cannot draw a line and say, ‘Here we start.’ The facts are the other way. We started long ago, and our very life depends upon keeping alive all that we have thought and felt during our history. If the continuity is taken from us, we shall relapse.” (John Jay Chapman, 1910, Learning and Other Essays )

Most Truly a Friend

“…the man of the Renaissance who made him most truly a friend, perhaps the most Horatian of all the literary figures that we know, was Montaigne. He quotes him, perhaps, no more than he quotes other great Classical writers, but it was from Horace that he received the stimulus to write about himself, and blessed like him with a country estate and a love of good literature, he achieved the same calm, sane, detached outlook on life, and the self-knowledge that can be derived from the observation of others.” (L. P. Wilkinson, 1945, Horace and His Lyric Poetry)