Incipit Nunc Futurum.

…or so read an impression stamped in the cement of the school yard we had wandered into one moony night a few evenings back. And then, on a sun dial, perched up on the school's wall, the ever popular rosebud gathering caveat "carpe diem".

It must be a Catholic School, I remarked, to be throwing all this Latin out at the children.

I wonder what Horace would have thought of the legacy of his most famous phrase; now nearly ubiquitous among the high school set? As a man who wrote far too much poetry about how nice it was to wake up early and at least a couple too many poems about how right it is to die in the bellicose service of the state, the modern educational system would probably have pleased Horace; at least in so far as he was probably a sadistic prick who would have enjoyed, evil principal-like, making teenagers suffer needlessly while at the same time convincing himself that he was doing them a long-term favour.

He would be just the kind of person who would stamp something as condescending as "the future begins now" in Latin under the feet of the children as they played. There is no time to idle in the directionless follies of childhood; one must be considering at all times how one can personally improve and how one can become an effectively functioning cog in the whirling tines of civilization.

That's one reading, anyhow. Incipit Nunc Futurum could be a call to any kind of personal improvement, not just one that leads to soul-killing labour for the sake of the continuance of the economy. And, also, Horace was very fond of screwing young boys and wrote plenty of poetry about it (which rarely gets mentioned during high school graduations) and so it's not likely he'd get a job teaching young children…but then again it was a Catholic school.

I refer you to Horace's ode 1.5, in which he begins by describing how, in a perfumed grotto he is dreaming of pressing his engorged loins up against the lithe body of a slender lad, stretched out upon a bed of roses. If ever you are at a high school graduation, or you are entering a caption in a year book, or you are doing any such thing, I encourage you to think upon this poem, rather than boring old "carpe diem"…for, teaching ways to avoid being fucked and robbed of one's innocence by dirty old men is a far better lesson to impart to the young than an offering of the vain hope that they will be able to carve out any kind of living that is both highly individualistic and at the same time over-brimming with happiness and contentment.