Month: March 2016

One of my Latin assignments at high school was to go around Wellington looking for old Victorian and Edwardian buildings with Latin mottoes on them. My friends and I piled into a car and went for a drive around the central city. We didn’t have to look hard. There were all sorts of Latin mottoes in places we hadn’t expected, including “Lumen accipe et imperti” on our own school grounds. Wellington’s nineteenth-century Catholic cathedral had lots, and others, on various public buildings, encouraged virtue and industry (and membership of the exclusive club of Latin-knowers). Somewhere, I can’t remember where, maybe at an art gallery, we saw one that really spoke to me: “Ars longa, vita brevis.”