Quote of the Day (Poetry’s Horace, on How ‘It’s Sweet Sometimes To Play the Fool’)

“Abolish delay, and desire for profit,
and, remembring death’s sombre flames, while you can,
mix a little brief foolishness with your wisdom:
it’s sweet sometimes to play the fool.” — Roman poet Horace (65 BC-8 BC), Odes, Book IV, xii, “Spring,” translated by A. S. Kline (2003)

The image accompanying this post comes from “Make ‘Em Laugh” from the beloved (and hilarious) 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain, with Donald O'Connor showing how it’s done.

Quote of the Day (Horace, on Coping With Adversity)

“Remember when life's path is steep to keep your mind even.”—Roman poet and satirist Horace (65 BC-8 BC), in Horace for English Readers: Being a Translation of the Poems of Quintus Horatius Flaccus Into English Prose, by E. C. Wickham (1903)

Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on Old Friends)

“Content with little, I can piddle here 

On brocoli and mutton round the year; 

But ancient friends (tho’ poor, or out of play) 

That touch my bell, I cannot turn away.” —English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace Imitated: The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace

Quote of the Day (Horace, on Order as ‘The Greatest Grace’)

“Set all things in their own peculiar place,

And know that order is the greatest grace.”—Ancient Roman poet Horace, “Art of Poetry,” translated by English poet John Dryden (1631-1700), in “Observations on the Art of Painting” (1695), in Prose Works, edited by George Saintsbury (1893)

Quote of the Day (W.H. Auden, on His Poetic ‘Refreshment’)

“As I get older, and things get gloomier and more difficult, it is to poets like Horace and [Alexander] Pope that I find myself more and more turning for the kind of refreshment I require.” – W.H. Auden, “A Civilized Voice” (review of Peter Quennell’s Alexander Pope: The Education of Genius, 1688-1728), The New Yorker, February 22, 1969

Quote of the Day (Horace, on the Value of Discipline)

“The envious, the choleric, the indolent, the slave to wine, to women–none is so savage that he can not be tamed, if he will only lend a patient ear to discipline.”--Horace, Epistles, I

Bonus Quote of the Day (Horace, Anticipating Charlie Sheen by Two Millennia)

Ne, quicunque Deus, quicunque adhibebitur heros,
Regali conspectus in auro nuper et ostro,
Migret in Obscuras humili sermone tabernas:
Aut, dum vitat humum, nubes et inania captet.

(Translation:

“But then they did not wrong themselves so much,
To make a god, a hero, or a king,
(Stript of his golden crown, and purple robe)
Descend to a mechanic dialect;
Nor (to avoid such meanness) soaring high,
With empty sound, and airy notions fly.”—Horace, Ars Poetica, translated by Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon

I don’t know about you, Faithful Reader, but I’ve given up tracking the daily pronouncements and news surrounding Charlie Sheen. He’s not only put out of business the crew of his own show, but also late-night comics, prime-time entertainment journalists and bloggers such as myself who hoped to say something definitive that would not be superseded by each successive news cycle involving the (now former) star of Two and a Half Men.

Heck, he’s even trying to sideline the editors of Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations: the number of catchphrases he’s minting with each Tweet and TV appearance (“tiger blood,” “bi-winning,” etc.) has grown so ridiculously immense that he now requires not just a few pages, but an entire CD unto himself.

When did Sheen transform from a bratty, limited-talent son of a Hollywood star into the highest-paid actor on TV, hellbent on taking down his long-running show? In other words, when did this example of garden-variety Tinseltown megalomania become a tale of not-so-ordinary madness?

Sheen likens himself to “a total freakin’ rock star from Mars.” Indeed, in our current culture, it takes only a nanosecond to morph from a rock star to a rock god. (And doesn’t a god deserve “goddesses,” like the twentysomething women from the adult-entertainment industry in his pad?)

You have to go back a long way to find people who thought they had so many divine powers—the Roman emperors, to be exact. My guess is that Sheen knows only one phrase from the centuries of Roman domination of the world: Horace’s Nunc est bibendum (“Now we must drink”).

But the great poet of the Augustan Age, in Ars Poetica, has some things to say apropos of the descent of gods into the common muck.


Fundamentally, Sheen has to watch out. It’s not just because the world outside his hermetically sealed, “bi-winning” environment shows signs of tuning him out (even the witches of Salem became so offended by his use of “Vatican assassin warlock” that they performed a “magical intervention”).

It’s also because that same public is emitting increasing signs that, though it is willing to forgive the worst—and repeated excesses—of stars, it expects repentance. Mental illness only goes so far to excuse someone who endangers his life and his family members, then goes on a 24/7, seven-days-a-week, ad hoc reality show, then sues the creative powers that tried to use tough love to save his life. The crowd, as Horace shrewdly observed, scorns performers prancing around “With empty sound, and airy notions fly.”

Far more talented actors than Sheen have come a cropper, especially for excesses eerily reminiscent of his. Had he opened his paper or turned on his TV this week, he might have seen someone in his corner, Oscar winner and past box-office star Mel Gibson, pleading guilty to a misdemeanor assault charge for battering the mother of his child, with a career grounded for the last five years after a drunk-driving incident that included an anti-Semitic rant as out-of-left-field as Sheen's own. (See last month’s Vanity Fair article on the roots of Gibson’s decline.)

But, if Sheen really wants a glimpse of his frightening future, he would do well to rent or catch on TCM the 1933 golden oldie, Dinner at Eight—and, in particular, concentrate on John Barrymore, in a role based on his persona and in a performance as emotionally naked and terrifying as any Sheen can ever hope to see.

“The Great Profile” was just a little more than a decade removed from his electrifying Broadway turn as Hamlet, but he was already headed straight for his sorry career finale—an inebriated has-been whose failing memory--and consequent need to improvise anything on the spot--led to the pathetic spectacle of audiences laughing at his expense.

In Dinner at Eight, the situation faced by Barrymore’s character Larry Renault should strike a chord of recognition in Sheen: a star in the grip of substance abuse, abandoned at last by a press agent exhausted from covering for his endless excesses Before his lonely end, Renault/Barrymore looks in the mirror and finds only exhaustion and emptiness. Like Sheen, he finds himself, in Horace’s words, “Stript of his golden crown, and purple robe”—and the discovery shatters him.

Quote of the Day (Horace, Demonstrating Why the Ancients Would Have Been Stunned by Man Walking on the Moon)

“No barrier is too high for mortals;
In our foolhardiness we try
To escalade the very sky.
Still we presumptuously aspire,
And still with unabated fire
Jove hurls his thunderbolts of fire.”—Quintus Horatius Flaccus (Horace), The Odes of Horace, translated by James Michie (1987)

The Roman poet Horace (65-8 BC) would not have glimpsed kindred spirits in the Apollo 11 crew that journeyed to the moon on July 20, 1969. Where they were physically fit, he cheerfully admitted to being chubby; where they had ventured far from home, he was content to live on his farm; where they were willing to risk their lives in a vulnerable capsule dwarfed by the immense universe they were penetrating, he was careful to avoid even the suspicion of offending his patron, the Emperor Augustus.

In “One Giant Leap to Nowhere,” a New York Times op-ed yesterday about declining interest in space following the lunar mission, Right Stuff author Tom Wolfe alludes to the “Promethean” nature of the voyage undertaken by astronauts Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins. The Promethean myth is also at the center of Horace’s concern here.

I’m not sure how the ancient Romans or Greeks could have even begun to surmount the bounds of earth. But the Romans, practical engineers par excellence, did have the kind of interest in arenas, infrastructure, and defenses against enemies that underlay America at mid-century. Maybe Horace’s verses here represented a veiled warning to his countrymen on the perils of such impulses.

John F. Kennedy’s bold statement in 1961 that America would put a man on the moon within the decade required eight years and an expenditure of $25 billion. Such a venture today, in a country financially hard-pressed, would be absolutely inconceivable.

In 1978, historian Michael Hart wrote a book called The Hundred: A Ranking of the Most Influential Persons in History. He put JFK on the list (#81) solely because the President fired up Americans’ interest in going to the moon.

Ironically, however, we know now that Kennedy, as rational and cautious a man (in his policies, anyway) as any who ever occupied the White House, was not interested in the scientific aspects of space, according to Craig Nelson’s new history, Rocket Men. He came to his full-throated advocacy of the cause at least partly for the same reason that he did the civil-rights movement: because of its link to the Cold War.

Increasingly as his administration went on, Kennedy grasped the complications of persuading newly decolonized nations to join “the long twilight struggle” against the Soviet Union when America allowed a substantial amount of its residents to live without the rights they deserved.

Similarly, as he assumed office, even while listened to the best scientific minds in the country, he did not find anything intrinsically valuable about exploring the stars. But he became convinced that, by losing the “space race,” the Third World would wonder if America really enjoyed the superiority it claimed over the Soviet bloc.

Ironically, the man who persuaded the President about the necessity of the space program was his Vice-President, Lyndon Johnson. I wrote “ironically” for a couple of reasons:

* If the President’s brother Bobby had had his way, Johnson would not have been able to catch JFK’s ear on even this matter, but would have been entirely consigned to attending funerals for world leaders.

* When LBJ became president, he could have diminished funds for the space program. Instead, he maintained them at full strength.

* In both the book and film adaptation of The Right Stuff, LBJ comes across as a hysterically egocentric politico—someone who tells associates that the Russians “have our peckers in their pockets” and who fumes in his limo as shy astronaut wife Annie Glenn refuses to admit him, his entourage and his media circus into her home—rather than as a shrewd, forceful and effective proponent of the space program.

While we commemorate the space program today, a few other points:

* I’ve always been fascinated by autographs and their historical and financial value. Since 1994, Neil Armstrong’s, according to a Boston Globe article last week, has risen to the point where his signature is now the most sought-after by a living human being. The former astronaut spurred this upsurge because, after 1994, he stopped signing autographs out of concern over forgeries.

* Armstrong’s hometown is Wapakoneta, Ohio, which now maintains in his honor the Armstrong Air and Space Museum. I myself had occasion to visit this site on my passage through the town more than 20 years ago, when another resident married my oldest brother. I’m sure that Armstrong regarded his lunar mission as the great adventure of his life, but for sheer daring I doubt it can match my sister-in-law’s decision to become a part of our family.

* Perhaps as good a reason as any to journey back to the stars—not just to the moon, but to Mars, the next logical destination—is not what it teaches about other heavenly bodies but about what it shows about the beauty and fragility of our own planet. The image accompanying today’s post shows, from the lunar surface, the "earthrise." Breathtaking, right? A similar picture taken during the Apollo 8 mission gave tremendous impetus to the environmental movement, according to an NPR story. It can’t hurt to have another such reminder today.

The fear that Horace expressed in his poem concerned the tendency toward hubris, the belief that human beings can solve all things, that the laws of nature and history don’t apply, or at least that they can be bent to our will. The Vietnam War—a conflict catastrophically widened by a liberal Democratic administration—was an example of how ignoring limits courts catastrophe. The lunar landing—a triumph of ingenuity and daring conducted under the same administration—likewise sought to surmount limits.

Perhaps the American mission in space succeeded in the 1960s because, virtually every step of the way, we wanted to know every possible danger so we would not be unprepared, alone and in the vast darkness of space.

After all, it sometimes gets lost, in the triumphalistic narratives and commentaries of the past week commemorating this epochal event, that the moon looked, according to Apollo 11 pilot Collins, like a “withered, sun-seared peach pit.” "There is no comfort to it," the atronaut continued; "it is too stark and barren; its invitation is monotonous and meant for geologists only.”