The Troubadour Podcast

On Dealing With Fear: Motorcycles, The Iliad and Plagues

March 23, 2020 Kirk j Barbera
The Troubadour Podcast
On Dealing With Fear: Motorcycles, The Iliad and Plagues
Show Notes

On this episode I spend some time discussing my observations from talking to people during this crisis and I share my personal lessons from riding a motorcycle.

Literature can provide us with models for living and for dying. This may seem like an un-important thing, but it is absolutely critical. Death frames life. Without death we would have no reason to live. Poems that show us decaying and death can provide for us insights and ways to contemplate our own mortality and how to behave at times of higher risk.

Poems read:
Old Man Travelling: Animal Tranquilty and Decay, A Sketch
by William Wordsworth

The Death of Simoeisios (excerpt from The Iliad)
Iliad, Book 4, lines 473-489 (trans. Seth Schein)