Daily Stoic Sundays: You Must Stare This Scary Fact in the Face

On today’s podcast, Ryan discusses the idea of memento mori as depicted in art throughout the centuries, and why it might be such a common motif. This episode is brought to you by Future. Future pairs you up with a remote personal trainer that you can get in touch with from your home. Your trainer will give you a full exercise regimen that works for your specific fitness goals, using the equipment you have at home. It works with your Apple Watch, and if you don’t already have one, Future will give you one for free. Sign up at tryfuture.com/stoic and get your first two weeks with your personal trainer for just $1. Get Stillness Is the Key for just $3.99: https://geni.us/stillnesssale***If you enjoyed this week’s podcast, we’d love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. It helps with our visibility, and the more people listen to the podcast, the more we can invest into it and make it even better. Sign up for the Daily Stoic email: DailyStoic.com/signupFollow @DailyStoic:Twitter: https://twitter.com/ryanholidayInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/ryanholiday/Facebook: http://facebook.com/ryanholidayYouTube: https://www.youtube.com/dailystoicSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info. 📢 Share | ⚙️ Manage Subscription

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:04Ryan Holiday?

  Welcome to the weekend edition of The Daily Stoic. Each weekday, we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoics, something that can help you live up to those four Stoic virtues of courage, justice, wisdom, and temperance. And here on the weekend, we take a deeper dive into those same topics. We interview Stoic philosophers, we reflect, we prepare, we think deeply about the challenging issues of our time, and we work through this philosophy in a way that's more possible here when we're not rushing to work or to get the kids to school, when we have the time to think, to go for a walk,

• 0:46Ryan Holiday?

  to sit with our journals, and to prepare for what the future will bring. Apple Watch, so that your trainer can see what progress you're making, and then even making adjustments as needed, just like an in-person trainer. And the crazy part is, and I'm serious, if you don't have an Apple Watch, Future sends you one for free. Sign up for Future today at tryfuture.com/stoic, and you get your first two weeks with a personal trainer for just $1. That's tryfuture.com/stoic for two weeks for a buck. That's crazy. Tryfuture.com/stoic. Today's presentation for you today is about one of the,

• 1:30Ryan Holiday?

  I think, the hardest things to do, which is facing our mortality, the fragility of existence. And that's why I look at sort of historically how this idea has been represented in art, how this COVID-19 global pandemic that we're in is forcing us to stare at some uncomfortable realities, some deeply morbid and macabre sort of things that, as a society, we thought were past. You know, the idea of potters' fields, the idea of having to bury people in public parks as they're temporarily doing in New York City, the idea that cities are backing up freezer trucks to deal with the tragic victims of this. You know, it calls to mind... The time of Marcus Aurelius, Marcus Aurelius famously weeps when when he thinks of all

• 2:14Ryan Holiday?

  the victims of the Antonine Plague. That's where we are right now, whether we like it or not. And so today's piece is about staring that reality in the face and how doing this, how doing it stoically, doing it philosophically, gives us wisdom, perspective, and most importantly, some humility. You must stare this scary fact in the face. If you've ever looked at much ancient or medieval art, you'll notice something. Death is everywhere. The French painter Philippe de Champsagne's famous still life with a skull shows three of the essentials of existence: the tulip, life, the skull, death, the hourglass time. There is a beautiful anonymous German

• 2:58Ryan Holiday?

  engraving from 1635 that features a standing, smiling skeleton aiming a crossbow. There is a towering wall of hundreds of smiling skulls unearthed at the ruins of the great temple in the Aztec capital. There are the famous cadaver tombs of Europe, the plastered Jericho skulls filled with soil and decorated with seashells from some 10,000 years ago. There's even a church in Rome made almost entirely out of the bones of dead priests who have worked there over the centuries. And this is a trend that has continued up through the modern era. One of Van Gogh's earliest works is a skull of a skeleton with

• 3:39Ryan Holiday?

  a burning cigarette. There's even an early, though mostly forgotten Walt Disney cartoon called Silly Symphony, which is five minutes of dancing skeletons doing all sorts of funny but macabre things. And in 2007, an artist in Richmond, Virginia, named Noah Scalen, spent an entire year making a skull a day out of anything he could get his hands on. Why is death so common in art? It's because death is common in life, and it was once even more common. Take someone like Marcus Aurelius. His father died when he was just a boy, his grandparents shortly after. He lost his adopted father and cherished mentor.

• 4:20Ryan Holiday?

  Of his children, eight died before him, and his 15-year reign was flooded with wars abroad and plagues at home. Even his last words in 180 CE, having led Rome through the worst of the Antonine Plague, which killed more than 10 million people, Marcus began to show symptoms of the disease. By his doctor's diagnosis, he had only a few days to live. He sent for his most trusted friends to plan for his succession and to ensure a peaceful transition of power. Bereft with grief, these advisors were almost too pained to focus. Marcus reproached them for taking such an unphilosophical attitude, his biographer

• 5:00Ryan Holiday?

  writes. They should have instead been thinking about the implications of the Antonine Plague and pondering death in general. Weep not for me, began Marcus's famous last words. Think rather of the pestilence and the deaths of so many others. Memento mori. Remember, we are mortal. It is a constant theme in art because it's a fact that's as easy to forget as it is scary to think about. It's unpleasant. And besides, given all our modern advancements in technology, isn't it a little fatalistic? Isn't there a chance we may live forever? There's nothing quite like a global pandemic to wake us up from our silly fantasies. Less than two months after the chair of the New York City Council Health Committee poked

• 5:44Ryan Holiday?

  fun at the coronavirus scare on Twitter, the now-sobered Mark Levine announced the potential need for temporary graves in public parks. Parks, hospital ships, refrigerated trucks, and other makeshift morgues filled faster than the hospitals did, and by the end of April, New York City ran out of space for its dead. Maybe we should have been a little more prepared, a little stronger and a little tougher, a little less convinced that we had escaped the fate of those that lived long ago. They certainly tried to warn us in their writing and by example. Moses said, "Teach us to number our days that we may gain a heart of wisdom." Michelangelo said, "No thought exists in me which death has not carved with its chisel." The essayist Michel de Montaigne was fond of an Egyptian

• 6:30Ryan Holiday?

  Custom where during times of festivities, a skeleton would be brought out with people cheering, "Drink and be merry, for when you are dead, you shall look like this." Shakespeare wrote, "Every third thought should be my grave." Mozart said, "As death, when we come to consider it closely, is the true goal of our existence." And Tolstoy said, "If we kept in mind that we will soon inevitably die, our lives would be completely different." That's over 3,000 years of wisdom on the same theme, a theme which predated and continued long after each of them and will continue after each of us as well. For most of history, memento mori was more than art, was a practice. Desks were staged with skulls to remind people of the urgency of life.

• 7:13Ryan Holiday?

  On their walls hung paintings of skeletons, hourglasses, extinguished candles, wilting tulips. In their pockets, they carried memento mori medallions and watch keys. "It wasn't just a generalized response to mortality," says Elizabeth Welch, an art curator at the Blanton Museum, "but instead specifically a performative social leveling that could be used by the late medieval Christians to think about mortality and the inevitability of physical decay." The physical manifestation of memento mori helped our ancestors process the pain that followed around them each day. The bodies on the streets and the battlefields didn't create panic, but priority, humility, urgency, appreciation.

• 7:56Ryan Holiday?

  I've talked about my own memento mori, a two-sided coin. On the front, it has a rendering of that still life with a skull. On the back, it has Marcus Aurelius's quote, "You could leave life right now, let that determine what you do and say and think." Except I cut out the last part as a reminder that there isn't even time to go through the whole quote. But my real memento mori practice begins when I brush my teeth in the morning and when I brush them before bed in the evening. There, propped under my bathroom mirror, I have a chunk of an old Victorian tombstone. How it left that cemetery and came to be for sale, I don't know, and I don't want to know. But I know that it sobers me and sets me right each time I look at it, because the piece has just one word on it. It says,

• 8:40Ryan Holiday?

  Dad, somebody who so identified with that word that they wanted it on their tombstone, who lived and died and whose gravestone eventually fell into disrepair. Who were they? How did they pass? Are they missed? Were they famous? Doesn't matter. They are gone now. And almost certainly, they were gone too soon. They left behind a family. They will never walk, or speak, or love, or cry again. And so it will be for me, and so it will go for you. I said before that this theme in art continues. One of the performance artists Marina Abramovic's most interesting pieces features her lying on her back completely nude, mimicking those ancient cadaver tombs. Laid on top of her in the exact same position is a female skeleton,

• 9:25Ryan Holiday?

  representing the last mirror we will all face. It's a beautiful haunting reminder of the before and after that every single living body ultimately expresses. Marina's piece has echoes of the Latin expression "Hodi mihi cras tibi." The skeleton is saying to the artist, "Today it's me, tomorrow it's you." We must remember, especially now, that life is ephemeral, that life is finite, that life is fragile. This should humble us, but also empower us. It should put everything in perspective. When my son comes up the stairs and calls me to come play, I have no problem stopping, because it could be the last time that he asks me. When I think about my work and phoning it in today, I think about how lucky I am to have today.

• 10:11Ryan Holiday?

  So I try to live, not just during a pandemic, but with the awareness that I may not be spared, that a virus has no mercy, that it doesn't care about what I've built, or how important I am. It doesn't care about any of us. Death is indifferent, and it is ruthless. That was the purpose of the once ever prevalent memento mori art, to remind people that death is ever-present. This could be your last day on this planet. As wonderful as it would be if there was no such thing as death, we have to use death as a tool. We have to use it to spur us to move forward. We have to use it as a reminder of what's truly important. And we have to be made better for the fact that we don't know how much time we have. We never do, and we never will. Memento Mori.

• 10:55Ryan Holiday?

  If you're interested in something for your memento mori practice, you can check out the items we have in the Daily Stoic store. You can go to store.dailystoic.com. I carry the memento mori coin in my pocket. There's also a memento mori signet ring that I like to wear. We've also got a number of great memento mori videos on our YouTube channel, youtube.com/dailystoic. And on dailystoic.com, we've got some articles that dig deeper into the history of memento mori. So be well. This could be the last podcast you listen to. It's gonna be the last day you have on this planet. Use it wisely, use it well, be good. Hey, just a cool heads up. Stillness is the key is for sale on Amazon, iBooks, anywhere that eBooks are sold right now

• 11:38Ryan Holiday?

  at a steeply discounted price of $3.99. I don't choose this. The publishers and Amazon put their heads together every once in a while and discount it. So that's available right now. Check it out. I think it's some of my best writing. It pertains to everything we've been talking about here at Daily Stoic. You know, how can you slow things down? How can you get to that place of ataraxia that the Stoics talk about? Place of apathia, when we're not disturbed by outside passions. We're not roiled by internal tensions either. But we can focus, as Marcus said, concentrate like a Roman, deal with what's in front of us, be still. That's what the book is about. It's the third in the sort of Obstacles Away, Ego is the Enemy trilogy. And now it's for sale for $3.99 on Amazon. Check it out, anywhere books are sold.