Living The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa
  • 5.0 (2)
  • PERSONAL JOURNALS

This podcast began with me writing letters to my soulmate/literary doppelganger Fernando Pessoa. I then went off and got lost on YouTube making "content" for a couple of years but sucked at that. So I'm now back here podcasting! Some of the new pieces will be Pessoa/Book of Disquiet focused, but much of the new stuff, as the title of the show suggests, will be me living my own book of disquiet through texts/films/music which I feel FP would have vibed with. I hope you will stick around for these new episodes in 2026. Say hi if you like here: livingthebookofdisquiet@gmail.com Steve x

  1. 11/14/2025

    Pessoa, c'est nous?

    Good morning FP, I was lying in bed half an hour ago wondering if I should stop writing to you, stop trying to connect to another human being through the medium of writing. For this is a peculiar game I am playing here am I not?  A man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. He gets a bit closer and recognises that the tree is a kind of proxy for the conversations this man maybe wishes to have with another. So he approaches the man and offers him an ear: talk to me and I will respond as another man might, or even as a tree, he says. Alternately, a man sees another man standing in a clearing talking to a tree. How peculiar, he thinks, and walks on, leaving the man and the tree to whatever understanding they might learn to glean from each other. Perhaps this is your response to my fable, a poem from 1933? The master without disciples had a flawed machine. Despite its levers and gears it never did anything. It served as a barrel organ when there was no one to hear it. When silent, it tried to look curious, but no one came near it. My soul, rather like that machine, is flawed, complicated, erratic, and serves no purpose at all.

    14 min

  2. 11/12/2025

    Do We Need Anybody? (We Need Somebody to Love)

    FP, in this missive I write to you about addiction and abstinence, about Bhavesh and me spending an evening without our respective substances, and the idea that therapy, like religion, depends on confronting what one cannot renounce. I describe the Beatles and their articulation of love as life’s central meaning, Freud’s belief that an analyst must face his own cravings to avoid moralising or colluding with a client, and Jung’s influence on Alcoholics Anonymous through the concept of spiritus contra spiritum. I examine psychotherapy as a secular religion with its own rituals, prohibitions, and codes of purity, and discuss the constraints of supervision, the fear of liability and exposure, and the rise of what I call the Church of Outrage. I consider the therapist’s position within capitalism, the tension between care and commerce, and the role of friendship in therapeutic work. I trace Freud’s intellectual inheritance from Judaism and Christianity, his inward turn toward the invisible, his resistance to redemption, and his fatalism made literal through his addiction to cigars. I contrast Freud’s stoic endurance with Father Teofan’s ascetic ideal and Hesse’s depiction of Narcissus and Goldmund as embodiments of transcendence and appetite. Finally, I return to you, Fernando, to the cafés, the wine, the solitude, and the way you refined all that corrosion into syntax, proving that style can outlast flesh.

    28 min

  3. 11/10/2025

    Everybody Needs A Bosom For A Pillow

    Hello FP, and thank you for being here.Here’s a new missive I’ve written for you about friendship and soulmates, dogs and gods, addiction, vanity, longing, kingship, numerology, therapy, loneliness, YouTube, tea, and clay. Also: Mário and Max, the breast and the bottle, writing as a drug, Pessoa (you, obviously, but also pessoas in general), writing as a wound, and the small, stupid, stubborn hope that one soul might still recognise another across centuries and timezones. About being a Four with a Five wing, the Green Girlfriend; ageing men with microphones and various Ghosts (Swayze! Krapp!) for company. About the commerce of care, the image-making factory, the melancholy of being too sensitive for one’s own good, and the strange consolation of Anankē.Here are (your) poems that I refer to in this piece: To the Memory of the Poet Mário de Sá-Carneiro (written shortly after Sá-Carneiro’s suicide in 1916)I do not know if this is dream or real,or a blend of both in me,this sense that splits my soulin two equal halves.One half lives in shadow, the other in light,one in mystery, the other in truth,and I, the being that joins and guides them,feel myself dead in life.I was another once. Today I am no one.What I was died with me.Of myself there lingers, for my torment,only the memory of what I too once was.You who were half my soul,you who were the mirror where I saw myself—Mário, you who were my calm,you who were my joy—today I am nothing but longing for you,and my soul is a cold corpsethat the wind carries, like a bare leaf,through a late autumn.---Fruits are given by trees that live,Not by the wishful mind, which adornsItself with ashen flowersFrom the abyss within.How many kingdoms in minds and in thingsYour imagination has carved! That manyYou’ve lost, pre-dethroned,Without ever having them.Against great opposition you cannotCreate more than doomed intentions!Abdicate and beKing of yourself.-Ricardo Reis (6 December, 1926)

    29 min

  4. 11/07/2025

    Beyond The Yellow Brick Road

    You, whose coming is so gentle that it resembles a departure, Whose ebb and flow of darkness, when the moon exhales, Contains waves of dead affection, cold as a sea of dreams, Breezes from landscapes fashioned to calm our excess of anxiety . . . You, palely, you, feebly, you, liquidly, or in the form of a numbing vapour, The smell of death among flowers, the whiff of fever on river banks, You, the queen, you, the chatelaine, you, the pale lady, come . . . From the closing section of Ode Marítima (1916) Pessoa writing as Álvaro de Campos. Translation: Margaret Jull Costa Tu, cuja vinda é tão suave que parece um afastamento, Cujo fluxo e refluxo de treva, quando a lua bafeja, Tem ondas de carinho morto, frio de mares de sonho, Brisas de paisagens supostas para a nossa angústia excessiva… Tu, palidamente, tu, flébil, tu, liquidamente, Aroma de morte entre flores, hálito de febre sobre margens,T u, rainha, tu, castelã, tu, dona pálida, vem…

    24 min

  5. 10/28/2025

    Riding For The Feeling

    "Taking nothing seriously and recognizing our sensations as the only reality we have for certain, we take refuge there, exploring them like large unknown countries. And if we apply ourselves diligently not only to aesthetic contemplation but also to the expression of its methods and results, it’s because the poetry or prose we write – devoid of any desire to move anyone else’s will or to mould anyone’s understanding – is merely like when a reader reads out loud to fully objectify the subjective pleasure of reading. We’re well aware that every creative work is imperfect and that our most dubious aesthetic contemplation will be the one whose object is what we write. But everything is imperfect. There’s no sunset so lovely it couldn’t be yet lovelier, no gentle breeze bringing us sleep that couldn’t bring a yet sounder sleep. And so, contemplators of statues and mountains alike, enjoying both books and the passing days, and dreaming all things so as to transform them into our own substance, we will also write down descriptions and analyses which, when they’re finished, will become extraneous things that we can enjoy as if they happened along one day." -Pessoa, TBOD, Fragment 1

    43 min

  6. 10/28/2025

    The Dignity of Tedium

    "He had furnished his two rooms with a semblance of luxury, no doubt at the expense of certain basic items. He had taken particular pains with the armchairs, which were soft and well-padded, and with the drapes and rugs. He explained that with this kind of an interior he could ‘maintain the dignity of tedium’. In rooms decorated in the modern style, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical distress. Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The rooms decorated in the modern style, tedium becomes a discomfort, a physical distress. Nothing had ever obliged him to do anything. He had spent his childhood alone. He never joined any group. He never pursued a course of study. He never belonged to a crowd. The circumstances of his life were marked by that strange but rather common phenomenon – perhaps, in fact, it’s true for all lives – of being tailored to the image and likeness of his instincts, which tended towards inertia and withdrawal. He never had to face the demands of society or of the state. He even evaded the demands of his own instincts. Nothing ever prompted him to have friends or lovers. I was the only one who was in some way his intimate. But even if I always felt that I was relating to an assumed personality and that he didn’t really consider me his friend, I realized from the beginning that he needed someone to whom he could leave the book that he left."Pessoa, TBOD (Preface)

    37 min

  7. 10/28/2025

    The Beautiful Uselessness of Simone Weil’s God

    This piece explores Simone Weil’s Factory Journal and her idea of Anankē—necessity—as a kind of sacred affliction: the possibility that what undoes us is also what connects us most deeply to reality. I'm including it here, because it is through Weil that I have returned to my initial Pessoan project, which will follow in subsequent fragments.

    36 min

  8. 06/15/2024

    Schubert's Ghost: Essence and Nihility (Fragment 363)

    This episode is about Schubert's awful and awesome bohemian life/music/death; a Victor Hugo sonnet from "Les Contemplations" ("La mort et la beauté sont deux choses profondes"); K.G. Nishitani on Nihility, sin and redemption; Fernando Pessoa's Fragment 363 (love, possession and illusion, the interplay of beauty and horror), with visuals courtesy of a walk around Rickmansworth Lake with Max listening to Sviatoslav Richter play Schubert's Piano Sonata No. 18 in G Major: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4o12iQ6n6Rs&ab_channel=SviatoslavRichter-Topic.

    27 min
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
2 Ratings

About

This podcast began with me writing letters to my soulmate/literary doppelganger Fernando Pessoa. I then went off and got lost on YouTube making "content" for a couple of years but sucked at that. So I'm now back here podcasting! Some of the new pieces will be Pessoa/Book of Disquiet focused, but much of the new stuff, as the title of the show suggests, will be me living my own book of disquiet through texts/films/music which I feel FP would have vibed with. I hope you will stick around for these new episodes in 2026. Say hi if you like here: livingthebookofdisquiet@gmail.com Steve x

Information

  • Creator
    Fernando Pessoa
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2025
  • Episodes
    18
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Fernando Pessoa
  • Show Website
    Living The Book of Disquiet