Laudator Temporis Acti

Jacques Perret (1906-1992), Horace, tr. Bertha Humez ([New York:] New York University Press, 1964), pp. 94-95:

The famous phrase Carpe diem, "Pluck the passing day," makes us grasp, I believe, one of the most essential aspects of Horace's moral personality. It is, naturally, in rapport with his temperament: this man of Mercury had the mobility of quicksilver; he was impulsive and volatile. Nevertheless, it is doubtful that he would have adopted this point of view if he had not attributed a true moral value to it. In fact, he places it in opposition to those vices that always most horrified him and that he battled all his life. One of the greatest reproaches that he makes against ambition and the love of riches is that these passions mortgage and annul the present—which one neglects to experience for what it is—in favor of a future that is surely chimerical, since, even if it were to be realized, and nothing is less certain, one would turn away from it at once: for one would not know how to live in it, forever driven on by the same incapacity that makes us strangers to the time in which we are living now. In future projects Horace always feared a treason to the present, the surest mark of moral instability and weakness.

Id., pp. 96-97:

Horace, then, did not like to think of the future. For him, tomorrow was the place not of hope but of uncertainties, and it was better not to try to dissipate these, for the only certitude that one risked finding instead was death. Yet death has a considerable place in the Odes, and it is clear that Horace did not like it. He did not seek to dress it up, or to volatilize it, or to persuade himself that it is a natural phenomenon that we should accept with indifference or at least without sadness. On that head, how little of an Epicurean he is! He did not succeed—but very rare, I think, are those who do—in living really entirely in the succession of present instants. Instead of feeling moment grains under his fingers like so many infrangible diamonds, he had a feeling of evanescence, and in the presence of that feeling he was without recourse. Most of us escape that anguish only by placing all our interest, all our love, in some great continuity external to ourselves, the fortunes of which will not be compromised by our own death. Horace's morality does not offer him this remedy. Should we pity him? Pity and condemn him both? If we could undertake a dialogue with him, would he not have much to say to us on the inhumanity, oversimplifications, and rejections that our behavior often dissimulates?

The translation seems awkward in parts, e.g. "Instead of feeling moment grains under his fingers like so many infrangible diamonds," where the French reads "Au lieu de sentir sous ses doigts la granulation des moments comme autant de diamants infrangibles."