As the hours count down, I'm thinking of Christopher Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus. "
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
FAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus,
Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,
And then thou must be damn’d perpetually!
Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,
That time may cease, and midnight never come;
Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make
Perpetual day; or let this hour be but
A year, a month, a week, a natural day,
That Faustus may repent and save his soul!
O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!
The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,
The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d…
The Latin "O lente, lente currite, noctis equi" means ”O run slowly, slowly, horses of the night !” It was first used by the Roman poet Ovid in Amores (Liber I, XIII, Line 40). The original context was thoroughly erotic. The Amores published in 16 BC was a poetic tribute to the poet’s love life, and the tag was an impassioned plea to the horses drawing the chariot of time to “slow down”, and to make the night pass more slowly, so that the author could spend longer in dalliance with his mistress.
In 1592 the great Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe borrowed this motif and used it in the climactic final scene of his tragedy Doctor Faustus. But the context is no longer erotic. Faustus who four years earlier had signed away his soul to the devil by signing a pact with the demon Mephistopheles in his own blood is now locked in his own study - abandoned by all his friends and listening to the clock strike eleven. Faustus knows that when the clock strikes midnight, his bargain will fall due, and that demons will appear and drag him to hell for all eternity.
40 hours. Tick. Tock.