Limits of freedom concerning the ‘semper morimur’ motif in Petrarch’s Epistola XXIV, 1
Limits of freedom concerning the ‘semper morimur’ motif in Petrarch’s Epistola XXIV, 1

Summary/Abstract: In order to demonstrate that a certain unease can be found in the general perception of a Renaissance author such as Petrarch, the text follows one of his letters written in Latin, On life’s brevity. On a larger scale, this letter is representative for an upcoming change within the mental structures corresponding to a feeling of loss and fragmentation as a result of partializedtime. Days are divided into hours, hours into minutes and seconds and, as the gap of measurement becomes smaller, it makes room for a painful realization: life is brief, even shorter than we think. Death becomes a greedy enemy as well as fleeing time does. It is crucial to point out that a heightened consciousness of time is relevant to a Renaissance author such as Petrarch and through a closer read of the cited letter, we can find an example of this conjunction of past ‘have-been’ and future ‘yet-to-be’ that is creative work to outdate a person’s earthly existence.

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