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Welcome to the weekend edition of the Daily Stoic. Each weekday we bring you a meditation inspired by the ancient Stoic, 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 worker to get the kids to school.

We have the time to sing to go for a walk to sit with our journals and to prepare for what the future will bring.

Hey, I'm Cassie Depeckel, the host of Wunderies against the odds. In our next season, Amelia Earhart wants to make history by flying across the Atlantic alone, but brutal weather and malfunctioning equipment could leave her lost at sea.

Listen to against the odds on Amazon music or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Today's presentation for you today is about one of the, 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've seen a lot of things that are happening in the world.

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 he thinks of all the victims of the Antenine 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 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 Deschampagnas famous still life with a school shows three of the essentials of existence, the tulip life, the school death.

The hourglass time. There is a beautiful anonymous German engraving from 1635 that features a standing smiling skeleton aiming across.

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 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.

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