The Dead Poets Society. It’s the best movie I have ever seen. It’s very inspiring and uplifting especially to a student like me. The movie taught me to seize the day…carpe diem.

Whenever I hear “carpe diem”, the first thing that comes to my mind are those colorful autograph books I used to sign back in elementary and high school. Carpe diem was so different from the usual “golden rule” my classmates would write for their motto. Besides, admit it. Carpe diem sounds way cooler. ;p

Anyway, I knew what carpe diem meant. It meant to “seize the day”. But it was just that to me. Seize the day and I was still my usual shy self and totally backboneless. Really. That is, until I saw the movie.

I’m not going to say here that the movie changed me big time. But the movie changed my perspective on life. It made me realize that we don’t have forever to do whatever it is that we should do. Our time is limited and we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow.

Also, the movie tackled the issue on passion. Mr. Keating, played by Robin Williams, is the english teacher at a strict all-boys boarding school. He was not the usual Engish teacher who would make his students read countless poems and discuss about them and bore the students to death. Actually, I’d like to have a teacher who’s just like Mr. Keating. He teaches the students to love the subject in its truest sense and not take it for granted even though it’s not related in any way to medicine or business or whatever.

For him, poetry is not just the measuring of poems according to its meter and stanzas and word count and it’s not even about rhyming. It’s being tuned to the human emotion. And it’s human emotion that makes poetry so useful to everyone and it’s the main ingredient that makes it so beautiful. It talks about the nature of humans.

And the Dead Poets Society? It’s a group of students who meet up in a cave once a week and take turns reading poems and just let the words and emotions drip from their tongues and let the magic of the moment consume them. I haven’t heard anyone describe their passions as effectively as Mr. Keating did. He was so passionate about it that a group of boys became the revived Dead Poets Society and loved the poems as they are. Now, isn’t that beautiful? =)

Some inspiring stuff from the movie… =)

To be read at the start of a meeting:

“I went to the woods because I wanted to live deep and seek out all the marrow of life! To put to rest all that was not life. And not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

– Dead Poets Society

“We don’t read and write poetry because it’s cute. we read and write poetry because we are humans. And there is passion.“

“Only in dreams humans are truly free.”

–Mr. Keating