Show Notes
Fall asleep to Homer's Odyssey, a voyage through mortality, memory, identity, and the difficult meaning of home.
Beginning with a man who refuses immortality, then entering the mystery of Homer and the firelit halls where singers carried the poem in memory, this longform episode follows Odysseus through the great trials of his return. It explores the dangerous power of names, the guest law, the cost of knowledge, the voices of the dead, and the fragile line between justice and revenge. Along the way, Penelope emerges as the wanderer's intellectual equal, while the scar, the bow, the orchard, and the bed rooted in a living olive tree reveal how recognition survives disguise and time. The story has lately returned to cinema screens, but its oldest questions remain unchanged. What makes a finite life worth choosing, what do we owe a stranger, and can anyone return to a home altered by absence. The closing movement follows the Odyssey through Dante, Tennyson, and Joyce, showing how every age remakes the wanderer in its own image.
Please listen only in safe, restful contexts.
Chapters: 0:00:00 Introduction: The Mortal Choice 0:01:23 Chapter 1: The Singer Called Nobody 0:10:19 Chapter 2: The Empty Throne 0:18:39 Chapter 3: The Mortal Shore 0:27:10 Chapter 4: The Hero Tells Himself 0:35:21 Chapter 5: Nobody in the Cave 0:48:04 Chapter 6: The Shape of Appetite 0:59:38 Chapter 7: Voices Under Earth 1:13:34 Chapter 8: Knowledge and Hunger 1:21:56 Chapter 9: The Stranger at Home 1:30:32 Chapter 10: Signs That Remember 1:37:58 Chapter 11: The Patient Equal 1:46:51 Chapter 12: The Quiet Reckoning 1:54:45 Chapter 13: The Rooted Bed 2:05:28 Chapter 14: The Inland Oar 2:14:58 Chapter 15: Every Age Returns
If this helped you rest, follow Sleepy Philosophy Radio on Spotify, and become a member to unlock member only episodes and help keep the show going. Music by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com) Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Tracks used: Anguish, Blue Feather, Evening Fall (Harp), Gregorian Chant, Heartbreaking, Lightless Dawn, Lone Harvest, Magic Forest, Mesmerize, Mourning Song, Oppressive Gloom, Promising Relationship, Quinn's Song: A New Man, Relent, Smoother Move, Sunset at Glengorm, Trio for Piano Cello and Clarinet, Wounded
More from Sleepy Philosophy Radio
Fall asleep to the life and ideas of Alan Watts, the philosopher who taught the West how to let go.
Fall asleep to Sigmund Freud, from a room full of buried gods to a chosen death in exile.
Fall asleep to Plotinus, the mystic who taught that all things flow from a single source and long to return.
Thank you for listening, whether this is your first episode or your fiftieth.
Fall asleep to the story of Mainländer, the philosopher who taught that God has died and death is our redemption.