今を生きる ima o ikiru Live the Moment
今を生きる (ima o ikiru), live the now, written いまを生きる with いま in kana, is the Japanese title of the film Dead Poets Society of 1989. The phrase was Japanese long before the film, and a critic asked in 1914 how to live the now. This study follows it into the teaching of a new religion of the 1930s and to the Latin carpe diem, the words that close Horace's ode, which the title renders.
Abstract
今を生きる, live the now, written いまを生きる with いま in kana, is the Japanese title of the 1989 film Dead Poets Society. The title renders the Latin carpe diem, Horace's pluck the day, which the film's teacher speaks and glosses as seize the day. The phrase was Japanese long before the film: a critic asked in 1914 how to live the now, a 1930 book of phenomenology wrote of living the eternal now, and in the 1930s 今を生きる was a phrase of the teaching of 生長の家, a new religion, in its founder's books and in a 1936 pamphlet that credits him.
Overview
The sense. Horace's advice by way of a film title, in a Japanese phrase that writers had used for living the present since at least 1914.
The words. 今 ima, now, the present, which the デジタル大辞泉 also gives as the instant, 瞬間, caught in the flow of time [1]; 生きる ikiru, to live; を makes the now the thing lived. The words are ordinary; kotobank's word page for 今を生きる returns no entry, and its いまを生きる is the film, in the デジタル大辞泉プラス [1]. 生きる is the plain form, not the command form 生きろ. Japanese Wikipedia says the title is the Japanese of the Latin the teacher speaks, and adds 厳密には「いまを生きろ」「いまを掴め」といった意味になる [2], strictly, it comes to mean live the now! or seize the now!
The text in English. The film's own English for carpe diem is seize the day: Carpe, carpe diem, seize the day boys, make your lives extraordinary [3].
The historical record
23 BC. Carpe diem. Horace's eleventh ode, in the first three books of the Odes, which English Wikipedia, after Hutchinson, says were issued as a collection in 23 BC [4], tells Leuconoe not to ask what end the gods have given, to strain the wine and cut long hope to the short space, and ends dum loquimur, fugerit invida aetas: carpe diem, quam minimum credula postero, while we speak, envious time will have fled: pluck the day, trusting the next as little as you may [5]. Carpe is the imperative of carpo, whose first sense in Lewis and Short's dictionary is to pick or pluck flowers and fruit; they set this diem among its uses for to enjoy, to make use of [6].
1914 to 1945. 今を生きる before the film. In 1914 the critic and poet Sōma Gyofū 相馬御風 [7] wrote that our greatest question is neither what circumstances nor what state of mind to live in, but たゞ如何にして今を生きんかの問題である, only the question of how to live the now, the phrase in its classical form [8]. In 1930 Takashina Junji 高階順治's 世界観的現象学 wrote of living その永遠の今, that eternal now [9]. In 1935 the teaching notes to a middle-school reader summed up an essay of Ichijima Shunjō 市島春城 on the word 今 as われ〳〵は「今」を生きる爲に全力を注ぐべきである, we must give all our strength to living the now [10]. The same year the phrase is in Taniguchi Masaharu 谷口雅春's 生命の実相 [11], the scripture of 生長の家, the new religion he began in 1929–1930 [12], and a book of his from 1938 has 生長の家では『今を生きる』と云ふ言葉が…, the phrase "live the now" in Seichō no Ie, and says it is in the fourth volume of the 全集, 『生長の家の生き方』 [13]. In 1936 Tsujimura Kusuzō 辻村楠造 published a pamphlet on Japan and world peace, 皇国大日本, whose section 一, in its closing pages, credits 谷口先生 with having lately revealed Japan's true aspect, its 實相 (近頃谷口先生に依てその實相を開顯された), and whose section 二, 實相の日本, explains 實相 as the world of enlightenment, 悟りの世界, and says 實相の世界は今を生きる世界だ。今といふても今といふうちに過去になつて居るその今を生きる世界だ, the world of true aspect is a world that lives the now, the now that is already past even as one says "now" [14]. The pamphlet names only 谷口先生; its 實相 and its world without matter, 物質無の世界, are the teaching that the 日本大百科全書 gives Taniguchi's 1929 revelation, 「物質はない」…「生命の実相を知れ」 [12], so the history takes 谷口先生 to be Taniguchi. 實相 is a Buddhist word, the true aspect of all things [15]; the teaching is Taniguchi's. The NDL Digital full-text index, searched as 今を生きる, finds it in 62 items to 1945, books and a few magazines, each copy counted, the oldest Takashina's, and 26 of them are Taniguchi's or his publisher's; searched as the classical 今を生きん, it finds first Sōma's book of 1914 [16]. Searched as 今を生きて, the index finds one item before 1930: a 1926 anthology of Meiji and Taishō writing, in its pages on Masamune Hakuchō 正宗白鳥's story 凄い眼, says of a man that he has neither ideals nor memories of the past: 唯今を生きて行けばよいのである, he need only go on living the now, where 唯今 can also be read as one word, tadaima, the present, with the same sense; whether these are the story's words or the editors' the excerpt does not show [16][17].
1989 and 1990. いまを生きる. Dead Poets Society opened in the United States on 2 June 1989 and in Japan on 17 March 1990 as いまを生きる. Japanese Wikipedia says the title is the Japanese of the Latin carpe diem that the teacher Keating speaks in the film [2]; the teacher's own English is seize the day [3]. No source read here ties the title to the religious use of the 1930s.
Today. The title is in the plain form, and I read it as keeping Horace's advice without his imperative: 生きる states what the Latin carpe orders.
A reading
Horace's advice by way of a film title, in a Japanese phrase that already had a life. Before the film, the now in 今を生きる was a place to stand: for 相馬, how to live it was the greatest question, and for the 1936 pamphlet that credits Taniguchi it was a world with nothing to worry over. The film made it an instruction to act. The brushed phrase is in the plain form, so it can be read either way, and I read it the older way: not a call to seize anything, but a statement of where one lives.
Japanese Scrolls by Master Calligrapher Eri Takase
References
- 「今」 (デジタル大辞泉; 精選版 日本国語大辞典) and 「いまを生きる」 (デジタル大辞泉プラス), kotobank; 今を生きる has no entry. https://kotobank.jp/word/今-435769 · https://kotobank.jp/word/いまを生きる-695173
- 「いまを生きる」, Japanese Wikipedia. https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/いまを生きる
- Dead Poets Society, English Wikiquote. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Dead_Poets_Society
- "Odes (Horace)", English Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Odes_(Horace)
- Horace, Odes, 1.11, at the Latin Library. https://www.thelatinlibrary.com/horace/carm1.shtml
- Lewis and Short, A Latin Dictionary (1879), carpo, at Perseus. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=carpo
- 「相馬御風」, kotobank (デジタル大辞泉; 精選版 日本国語大辞典). https://kotobank.jp/word/相馬御風-18485
- 相馬御風, 自我生活と文学, 1914, p. 98, scan 64. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/952035/1/64
- 高階順治, 世界観的現象学, 1930, scan 145 (excerpt). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1175004/1/145
- 光風館編輯所, 中学国文教科書教授備考 巻3, 1935, scan 49. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1456810/1/49
- 谷口雅春, 生命の実相 : 生長の家聖典全集 第14巻, 1935, scan 126 (excerpt). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1256054/1/126
- 「生長の家」, kotobank (デジタル大辞泉; 精選版 日本国語大辞典; 日本大百科全書). https://kotobank.jp/word/生長の家-86231
- 谷口雅春, 一流の人・妻・子を作るには, 1938, scan 169 (excerpt). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1072340/1/169
- 辻村楠造, 皇国大日本, 1936, p. 25, scan 14. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/1092528/1/14
- 「実相」, kotobank (デジタル大辞泉; 精選版 日本国語大辞典; ブリタニカ国際大百科事典). https://kotobank.jp/word/実相-74125
- NDL Digital Collections, full text, oldest first: 今を生きる; 今を生きん; 今を生きて. https://dl.ndl.go.jp/search/searchResult?keyword=今を生きる&fulltext=true&sortKey=ISSUED_ASC · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/search/searchResult?keyword=今を生きん&fulltext=true&sortKey=ISSUED_ASC · https://dl.ndl.go.jp/search/searchResult?keyword=今を生きて&fulltext=true&sortKey=ISSUED_ASC
- 宮島新三郎 等編, 文学鑑賞読本 : 明治大正名作新選 巻5, 1926, scan 50 (excerpt). https://dl.ndl.go.jp/pid/914327/1/50