Ars Longa

Mural at the Old Town Hall (Göttingen) [de] in Germany.

Hans A. Rosbach • CC BY-SA 3.0

The title of this post is part of a longer quotation. Not much longer; actually it is half of the whole thing. For many people, I suspect, this will be an old and familiar saying. Somehow I missed it until this week and it is a timely idea. I actually found it reading Hilary Mantel’s The Mirror and the Light. (The third in the much enjoyed trilogy about Thomas Cromwell.) 

The quotation in full is... 

ars longa, vita brevis

Which is a Latin translation from the Greek by Hippocrates. Which is in itself the reverse of the way it was expressed in the literal translation “vita brevis ars longa”.   

If you didn’t know or hadn’t figured it out already vita brevis means ‘life is short’ and ars longa ‘art is long’. The full passage in English is...

Life is short,

and art long,

opportunity fleeting,

experimentations perilous,

and judgment difficult.

It is remembered because it expresses a basic truth; or so I thought when I read it. Developing an art or a craft is a lifelong endeavor. Indeed, there is not enough time in a lifetime to really master a craft.  Art in the original Greek context was in terms of craft or technique (specifically medicine in Hippocrates case) and not necessarily ‘fine art’ though fine art too has craft and technique at least as far as I recognize it. 

Chaucer also says something similar in the Parlement of Foules (Parliament of Fowls) whether borrowed or original I do not know.  ‘The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.’

And so, what I have stumbled on sets the scene for what I had been recently contemplating this month about my own craft. I have recently retired from my paid career and had thought I had lots of time to pursue my interests and craft(s). After a few months, however, it seems that while I have more time to devote to them the time is not in any sense infinite as I might have imagined before. So now I find myself with an urgency I had not expected to feel. At nearly the same time as I understood this truth, I found that Hippocrates understood the same thing. Serendipity or confirmation bias has resulted in this timely collision of ideas.

There will not be enough time is the conclusion and this is the source of a new sense of urgency. To push myself along this journey or at least to be more deliberate or diligent in my pursuits.