Quintus Horatius Flaccus, better known simply as Horace, lived from 65 to 8 B.C. He’s the poet who gets credit for the phrase “carpe diem.”
Although the phrase generally is translated as “seize the day,” Harry Eyres, in his new book Horace and Me, translates the words as “taste the day.” As a writer in the Barnes & Nobles online newsletter recently explained, Eyres encourages people “to savor hours rather than hold them hostage.”
Eyres, this writer says, “believes that Horace’s celebration of life’s small pleasures offers a fine prescription for facing the stresses of our ever-accelerating world.”