Tempus Fugit

Tempus Fugit

I am no Latin scholar, but I did take four years of Latin in high school. My mother, who had never taken a moment of Latin during her education through graduate school, was convinced that Latin was an extremely useful course of study for a young man heading out into the world. You may recall that doctors used to write their prescriptions in Latin so as to make it less likely that scoundrels who stole their prescription pads could make counterfeit prescriptions. I guess the theory was that those less educated were also those less larcenous (a very bad assumption from my experience). Priests certainly needed to know Latin since in those days still, there was the whole liturgical procession with incense, pomp, ceremony and Latin. Lawyers too would make use of Latin to confuse the people they represented and the commoners in the court to make themselves and the jurists sound more profound and their judgements and pronouncements seem more meaningful. Habeus corpus based on corpus delecti and all that Perry Mason stuff. Even general literary scholars found need to use ibids et al to seem more sanctimonious and learned. In fact, Latin was used ad naseum much to the disdain of the illiterati or less educated common folk.

This was clearly something that started annoying people several centuries ago. So if the educated were going to have their secret language, so would regular people. Argots, or secret codes that people could make up were the answer, but it had to be something a bit more special than that, just to take the piss out of the pseudo-intellectuals using Latin. Thus was born Pig Latin (occasionally called Hog Latin, but not to be confused with Dog Latin, which is simply badly used regular Latin). Ixnay on the Atinlay. As a kid, who didn’t love the ease with which Pig Latin was learned and used with only minimal disruption of active grey matter? Tell a kid just once how to form a Pig Latin word and off he goes. Even when he or she encounters a tricky combination of syllables, they can pretty much make it all up on the spot, which is half the giggling fun of it all.

But, to be honest, I appreciate my mother’s insistence that I take a course in Latin and I even respect my own decision along the way to stick it out for four full years of the stuff. It was the last year when I got the chance to learn Caesar’s Gallic Wars (Gallia est omne divisa in partes tres. Quarum unam incollute Belgae, alliam Acquitani…..etcetera, etcetera). I learned it from a Brother of the Holy Cross who was on secondment to the Holy See and staying at our school in Rome. He was considered the foremost Latin scholar in the world at the time and he was there to update the Latin dictionary for all the new words that were needed to handle the latest technology of the day. To do that you needed to be steeped in Latin, but also be a classical linguist that understood how words were derived. I love the fact that I was momentarily able to sit at the hem of the robe of such a man. It somehow makes me feel more educated for it.

So, this morning as I sit here on the Ring of Kerry in Ireland and ponder the fact that Caesar’s Gallic Wars might not even exist for me to have learned all those years ago, had it not been for St. Patrick of Ireland and his mission to preserve the great works of Rome and Greece prior to the onslaught of the Dark Ages. That is what caused me to have the Latin term Tempus Fugit fly into my mind. Time does fly, and it sometimes flies in minutes, days, years and eons. We all sooner or later come to the eye-opening understanding that time is simultaneously our biggest friend, our worst enemy, the thing that we are most prone to waste and yet the thing we eventually all value the most dearly.

We have been here for ten days and have five more days to go until we board the plane at Shannon Airport after another three-hour harrowing early-morning ride on the narrow and winding roads of Western Ireland. This morning is again very non-Ireland-like in that it is sunny and warm and the Kenmare River (a.k.a. the Wild Atlantic inlet) is like a plane of glass in its stillness. We are gathering at the pier soon to take a speedboat ride across the inlet to a pleasant country pub on the far shore, where we will enjoy a country pub lunch in the traditional manner. It’s a fine way to spend a summer Tuesday, except that several of the group have awakened with maladies and doubts that have caused them to opt for a much longer car ride around the far end of the inlet to the pub. Its a shame that we all have to grow old and worry about things like rubber raft speedboat trips, but that’s what happens as tempus does indeed fugit.

I have never liked the concept of crossing off days on the calendar because it has always seemed like a fatalistic approach to life. I prefer not to think that I have been given so many days or so many years and despite the biblical suggestion that we all have three score and ten on this fine earth, improving medical science and better (questionable at best) nutrition suggests that longevity is much more a variable than ever. My own doctor of a dozen years recently told me that he was pretty sure that demon cardiac disease and demon cancer would not darken my door. He told me that my blood sugar implies I have no diabetes in my future despite my horrendous diet. So with all that in my favor, plus my 23-And-Me designation as a performance athlete in genetic composition, he was left to warn me seriously about the future of my joints. He suggested that ligaments and tendons care not about genetics, but only about wear and tear. God knows I wear and tear my connective tissues with great abandon, so the warnings are well-placed.

So as Tempus Fugit, I step lively but carefully. I enjoy every day as though it is my last and I grab all the gusto I can, but do so with the careful consideration that I do not want my joints to fugit before the rest of me reaches its tempus.