Dr. Paul Monk on Mortality and Meaning

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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