I hate posting the last graf of an article, but once again Adam Gopnik leaves me no choice. From his latest piece, on van Gogh and Gauguin:

It’s true that the moral luck dramatized by modern art involves an uncomfortable element of ethical exhibitionism. We gawk and stare as the painters slice off their ears and down the booze and act like clowns. But we rely on them to make up for our own timidity, on their courage to dignify our caution. We are spectators in the casino, placing bets; that’s the nature of the collaboration that brings us together, and we can sometimes convince ourselves that having looked is the same as having made, and that the stakes are the same for the ironic spectator and the would-be saint. But they’re not. We all make our wagers, and the cumulative lottery builds museums and lecture halls and revisionist biographies. But the artist does more. He bets his life.

The phrase that obviously comes to mind is "carpe diem," but at this point in the year, it's worth going to Horace's hows and whys as well. You can't seize the day like a jerk. Reasons via Wikipedia, with edits:

Don't ask (it's forbidden to know) what end
the gods will grant to me or you, Leuconoe. Don't play with Babylonian
fortune-telling either. It is better to endure whatever will be.
Whether Jupiter has allotted to you many more winters or this final one
which even now wears out the Tyrrhenian sea on the facing cliffs
— be wise, drink your wine, and scale back your long hopes
to a short period. While we speak, envious time will have already fled
Seize the day, trusting as little as possible in the next.

(I seized the day tonight with an Elevation burger. How bout you?)

Barry, Adam Sandler's character Punch-Drunk Love: "I don't know if there is anything wrong because I don't know how other people are."

Roger Ebert's review of Punch-Drunk Love:

He has darkness, obsession and power. His world is hedged around with mystery and challenge. Consider an opening scene, when he is at work hours before the others have arrived, and sees a harmonium dumped in the street in front of his office. It is at once the most innocent and ominous of objects; he runs from it and then peeks around a corner to see if it is still there.

"Ode" by Maureen N. McLane, in Slate's newsletter: "I was afflicted and afflicted you. / Be careful what you wish for / you warned. I was not careful / nor in the end thank god were you."

Horace's Odes, Book IV, Ode 1, the ode referenced at the beginning of McLane's poem, turning up in some reading before work today and confirmed by posters in Slate's Fray, John Connington translation:

Ah! but why, my Ligurine,
Steal trickling tear-drops down my wasted cheek?
Wherefore halts this tongue of mine,
So eloquent once, so faltering now and weak?
Now I hold you in my chain,
And clasp you close, all in a nightly dream;
Now, still dreaming, o'er the plain
I chase you; now, ah cruel! down the stream.

Same lines, Joseph P. Clancy translation:

But why, ah Ligurinus, why
does a tear now and then run trickling down my cheek?
Why does my tongue, once eloquent,
fall, as I'm talking, into ungracious silence?

At night I see you in my dreams,
now caught, and I hold you, now I follow as you
run away, over the grassy
Campus Martius, over flowing streams, with your hard heart.

Same lines, Richard Howard, New Translations by Contemporary Poets:

Then why, Ligurinus, why
do my eyes sometimes fill, even spill over?
Why, sometimes, when I'm talking
do I suddenly have nothing to say? Why
do I hold you in my arms
in certain dreams, certain nights, and in others
chase you endlessly across
the Field of Mars, into the swirling Tiber?

Text after a headline Jess found on a website this morning: "Nutritionexpertsurgeparentsto leadthe way tohealthfuleating."

Wilco song the text made me think of after listening to a Tweedy+Wilco bootleg over the weekend: Nothing'severgonnastandinmyway(again).

Tweedy lines from the same boot that had been running through my head earlier in the morning: "Dear employer, your escalators / Are very dangerous on the way down" jumping to the closing, repeating "That's the reason that I quit / The reason that I quit."

Lines from the same song I like now that I've read them this afternoon: "Dear employer, I heard a story / When you were just knee-high, higher than I / You built the wings, the propeller too / With balsa wood and glue you made it fly."

In the May 22 New Yorker (I'm way behind), Anthony Lane's article on adventurer and writer Patrick Leigh Fermor brought up a passage from Leigh Fermor's A Time of Gifts, which I've never read and probably never will. Towing a captured general across 1944 Crete and trying to make it to the coast, Leigh Fermor gave us this passage, which Lane quotes:

During a lull in the pursuit, we woke up among the rocks just as a brilliant dawn was breaking over the crest of Mount Ida. We had been toiling over it, through snow and then rain, for the last two days. Looking across the valley at this flashing mountain-crest, the general murmured to himself:

Vides ut alte stet nive candidum
Soracte …

It was one of the ones I knew! I continued from where he had broken off:

nec jam sustineant onus
Silvae laborantes, geluque
Flumina constiterint acuto,

and so on, through the remaining five stanzas to the end. The general's blue eyes had swivelled away from the mountain-top to mine — and when I'd finished, after a long silence, he said: "Ach so, Herr Major!" It was very strange. As though, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk at the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.

Lane went on to name Horace Odes 1.9 — so the Soracte did seem familiar. I got to Googling and came up with an Oxford translation that seemed too stiff. Looking deep on my drive, I came up with my high school translation and it seemed too amateur. Googling again, a University of Chicago-printed version turned up on a Purdue site, and it was just right.

See, the snows on Mount Soracte glare against
the sky, and the branches strain, giving way
eneath the weight, and the fluent
waters stand fast, fixed by the bitter freeze.

Take the chill off, piling plenty of logs
by the fireside, and pour out the wine, four years
aging, from the Sabine jar,
Thaliarchus, with a free hand.

Leave the rest to the gods, for once they quiet
the winds that are warring with the roaring
sea, cypress and ancient
ashtree are troubled no longer.

Do not ask of tomorrow what it may hold;
mark in the black each day you are granted
by Chance: you are young, no
sneering at loving and dancing

while the sap rises and whining old age
stays away. now is the time for playing field
and public squares with soft
whispers as night covers lovers meeting,

and now is the time for giveaway giggles
from the far corner and the girl in hiding,
and the prize snatched from her
arm or finger that (almost) resists.

Dan Neil has started his popular culture column.

March 6: "At places where high viaducts crisscross, such as the interchange at the I-15 and I-10 in Ontario, you can't see the bridges in the dark, and the few cars appear to be flying in stately progress across the sky."

March 13: "After all, this is a one-shtick reptile: Wade ashore on the mainland, snap a few high-voltage power lines, bear up under the awesome firepower of the miniature tanks. Not to mention that Godzilla is, well, a confirmed bachelor. He's a press agent's nightmare."

March 20: "There is a choreography to all this, even a kind of ritual: Inevitably, men baptize themselves with a little seawater on the backs of their necks and steal a glance at the sun, as if getting their bearings in a world that's just gotten a lot bigger. Is this a mannerism we've picked up from some old movie? Did Gary Cooper rub water on his neck just so? Did Balboa do the same?"

I'm not quite sure what to think.

The column feels somewhat like the country mouse to his auto column's city mouse. Or, maybe more accurately, Horace as the country mouse. Modern tellings like to put the mice and their homes on near-even ground, but the Roman poet — who originates the tale — sides clearly with the country mouse. That mouse gets the last word, and it's a swipe at the city. Owning a country villa himself, Horace sings of its advantages time and time again in his Odes. Not a whole lot happens at the villa, but he enjoys his time and writes well there. Whether I want that mindset in a newspaper column, I don't yet know.