Originally published with transcript at https://www.nickfabbri.com/bloom/paulmonkmortalityandmeaning

In this podcast, Nick and Paul discuss:

The commemoration of the dead through religious rituals, such as the Kaddish

Representations of mortality, death, and dying as expressed in poetry and literature

Why death exists in the world at all, as a function of life and natural selection

The intersection of the biological process of death and religious rituals around and for death

Concern for the dead in classical works such as The Iliad and Antigone

Paul’s journey with metastatic cancer and contemporary literature on mortality

Reviewing one’s priorities after confronting one’s mortality

Reflections on death and dying through everyday encounters with our built environment, such as cemeteries

Oliver Sacks and gratitude for the gift of life and consciousness

Dr Paul Monk is a poet, polymath and highly regarded Australian public intellectual. He has written an extraordinary range of books, from Sonnets to a Promiscuous Beauty (which resides in former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull’s library), to reflective essays on the riches of Western civilization in The West in a Nutshell, to a prescient 2005 treatise on the rise of China in Thunder from the Silent Zone: Rethinking China. 

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