Carpe Diem?
How much is enough? The question arises often and in many forms. The time came for transition from employer based medical insurance coverage to Medicare. Transition has proven to be challenging, complex, with a fair amount of anxiety. After all who cannot be protective of physical health once the youthful stage of life has passed and time is taking it’s toll? As a diabetic it is necessary that I use insulin day to day. I am not alone. Our American life style and diet has caused a dramatic rise in diabetes.
Uncertain as to how costly insulin might prove to be, or how much I would be allowed under Medicaid I was faced with a decision. How much insulin to stockpile against the future given that my insurance coverage was soon to lapse? How much could/should I take against a uncertain future? The question had no final, or certain answer. Carpe diem or not?
A few lines from John Milton’s Comus provoked fruitful meditation on “how much is enough” since it is grave reality that life is short and death is long. Comus is a seducer who makes the “carpe diem” argument to the lady. On what terms are we to live with the perpetual change of this world? This is her response…..
Nature
Means her provision only to the good,
That live according to her sober laws
And holy dictate of spare Temperance,
If every just man that now pines with want
Had but a moderate and beseeming share
Of that which lewdly pampered luxury
Now heaps upon some few with vast excess,
Nature’s full blessings would be well dispensed
In unsuperfluous even proportion……
—John Milton Comus lines 765-73
John Milton’s Comus was presented as a play in verse in 1634 at Ludlow Castle. Milton was twenty-five years old
