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🖼️ The Art of Knowing What Matters, Spiritual Freedom, Dying Light, and the Denial of Death
Monday Muse (Vol. 39)
Dear Readers,
Here is the latest Monday Muse with a meditation from our Dying Every Day series, a perennial reminder, a poem, and a recommendation to consider.
Be wise and be well this week!
💀 Dying Every Day
The Dying Every Day series is now part of the Monday Muse! This series is focused on delivering Stoic meditations on the art of living. Each meditation provides a quote, a selected passage, and a daily exercise.
***Listen to the meditation on In Search of Wisdom (Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts).
📌 Perennial Reminder(s)
In spite of all the enforced physical and mental primitiveness of the life in a concentration camp, it was possible for spiritual life to deepen. Sensitive people who were used to a rich intellectual life may have suffered much pain (they were often of a delicate constitution), but the damage to their inner selves was less. They were able to retreat from their terrible surroundings to a life of inner riches and spiritual freedom. Only in this way can one explain the apparent paradox that some prisoners of a less hardy make-up often seemed to survive camp life better than did those of a robust nature. […]
Source: Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl (via Reading & the Good Life)
📜 Perennial Poem(s)
This week’s poem, Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, is well-known by the poet and writer Dylan Thomas.
Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
by Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)
🔥 Recommendation(s)
Have you read The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker? Although it’s probably not everyone’s cup of tea( as they say). I’m enjoying it! But maybe I shouldn’t be too surprised; it did win the Pulitzer Prize in 1974. “Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie—man’s refusal to acknowledge his own mortality,” as the book description reads. But it explores much more; Becker sheds light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life.
The root of humanly caused evil is not man's animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst.
― Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death
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Thank you for reading/listening; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
J.W.
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