The Wisdom Of

Lord of the Flies is a novel by the English author William Golding, published in 1954. It’s a book about a group of boys whose airplane crashes on an uninhabited island somewhere in the Pacific ocean. The story is about their attempt to govern themselves without any adults around.

William Shakespeare was an English playwright born in 1564. Some of his most famous works include Romeo and Juliet, The Merchant of Venice, King Lear, Macbeth and Hamlet. His plays, which include tragedies, comedies and histories, have been translated into nearly every language and they’re performed more than any other playwright. He’s often considered to be the greatest writer in the English language. The play we look at today is Hamlet. 

The Possessed, or Demons, is a novel written by the Russian writer Dostoevsky and it was first published in 1871. It’s a story concerned with the catastrophic consequences of the political and moral nihilism that were becoming more prevalent in Russia in the 1860s. 

In this episode we compare modern versus ancient conceptions of happiness.

Emily Dickinson was an American poet, born in Massachusetts, in 1830. In this episode, we explore her views on death, nature, the senses, and the affirmation of life. 

Moby Dick was written by the American writer Herman Melville, and it was published in 1851

Civilization and its Discontents is a book by the founder of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud, published in 1930.

The Bacchae was written by the Greek playwright and tragedian Euripides around 410 BC. It’s no doubt one of his most provocative and dreadful tragedies.

Waiting for Godot is a play composed by the incomparable Irish writer Samuel Beckett, first written in French in 1948.