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PODCAST

Living The Book of Disquiet

Fernando Pessoa

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

society & culture personal journals

All Episodes

00:29:55

Speaking to No One in the Age of Content

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2026/01/09

Hey FP,You're a loner. I'm a loner. The writer Anneli Rufus is a loner. That shared condition is what pulled me back into her book Party of One: A Loner’s Manifesto, which has also sent me back to you.This episode is a letter to you about loneliness in the age of platforms, about why speaking now almost always means speaking into systems that do not want one soul addressing another, and about how art quietly degrades into content when expression is reorganised around optimisation, scale, and

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00:13:38

Pessoa, c'est nous?

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2025/11/14

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

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00:27:41

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

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2025/11/12

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

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00:29:11

Everybody Needs A Bosom For A Pillow

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2025/11/10

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

en

00:24:29

Beyond The Yellow Brick Road

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2025/11/07

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)

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00:54:53

Dream Action

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2025/11/01

"I have to choose what I detest – either dreaming, which my intelligence hates, or action, which my sensibility loathes; either action, for which I wasn’t born, or dreaming, for which no one was born. Detesting both, I choose neither; but since I must on occasion either dream or act, I mix the two things together." Pessoa, Fragment 2, TBOD--Hey FP!A few days ago, on a walk from Chalfont and Latimer to Chesham, a walk I’ve done a hundred times before, a song came up on my 'Liked

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00:43:10

Riding For The Feeling

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2025/10/28

"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

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00:37:08

The Dignity of Tedium

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2025/10/28

"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

en

00:35:30

The Beautiful Uselessness of Simone Weil’s God

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2025/10/28

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.

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00:27:00

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

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2024/06/15

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:

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00:32:38

Fragment 88: The Father of My Soul

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2024/05/28

A "Father Archetype" soul collage for Pessoa’s Fragment 88: “Who am I, finally, when I’m not playing? A poor orphan left out in the cold among sensations, shivering on the street corners of Reality, forced to sleep on the steps of Sadness and to eat the bread offered by Fantasy. I was told that my father, whom I never knew, is called God, but the name means nothing to me. Sometimes at night, when I’m feeling lonely, I call out to him with tears and form an idea of him I can love. But

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00:32:33

Fragment 307: Basic Trust (The Song Thrush)

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2024/05/17

An audio-visual Soul Collage created in response to Fernando Pessoa’s Fragment 307 (from The Book of Disquiet): “AESTHETICS OF DISCOURAGEMENT Since we can’t extract beauty from life, let’s at least try to extract beauty from not being able to extract beauty from life. Let’s make our failure into a victory, into something positive and lofty, endowed with columns, majesty and our mind’s consent. If life has given us no more than a prison cell, let’s at least decorate it as best we can – with the

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00:34:08

Fragment 32: Lucid Dreaming

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2024/05/07

“An episode chiefly inspired by 10 seconds of animation by Alyssa on her YouTube channel. Check out THE FULL TWELVE SECOND video ⁠here⁠. Also inspired by the following quote from fragment 32 of Fernando Pessoa's Book of Disquiet: "Underlying everything, the hushed night was the tomb of God (and my soul felt sorry for God).” OTHER TOPICS THAT CROP UP IN THIS EPISODE: -Lucid Dreaming: Rob’s experiences with lucid dreaming and the techniques he used to achieve it (counting backwards,

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00:33:57

Fragment 31: Beyond The Pleasure Principle

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2024/05/05

“The clock in the back of the deserted house (everyone’s sleeping) slowly lets the clear quadruple sound of four o’clock in the morning fall. I still haven’t fallen asleep, and I don’t expect to. There’s nothing on my mind to keep me from sleeping and no physical pain to prevent me from relaxing, but the dull silence of my strange body just lies there in the darkness, made even more desolate by the feeble moonlight of the street lamps. I’m so sleepy I can’t even think, so sleepless I can’t

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00:30:22

Fragment 30: An Arid Heart

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2024/04/28

"Sadly, or perhaps not, I recognize that I have an arid heart. An adjective matters more to me than the real weeping of a human soul. But sometimes I’m different."--- Send in a voice message: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/livingthebookofdisquiet/message

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00:45:23

Fragment 144: Sunday Mornin' Coming Down

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2023/09/11

In today's fragment of Disquiet, Fernando describes waking to a rain-cleansed Sunday, unveiling blue skies—a lovely morning that evokes melancholy as well as joy. He wanders aimlessly, the various Sunday rituals accentuating his isolation and longing.In my response to Rob and Pessoa, I relate how an unexpected encounter with a doppelgänger of a past love, Nadia, during a walk near Amersham evokes deep nostalgia. The shifting weather mirrors these emotions, and this Rilke poem further

en

00:35:42

Fragment 29: Don't Dream It's Over

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2023/09/08

In today's missive of disquietude (Fragment 29), Fernando talks about waking to a rain-washed dawn that gives way to “triumphant” blue skies—a beautiful morning in which he feels melancholic rather than happy. As he aimlessly paces his room, the various rituals of his day expose his isolation. He feels a longing that weighs on him like a damp rag left staining a window sill. I respond by sharing my own attempts to wrangle morning chaos—the various routines I follow meant to optimize

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00:21:23

Living (The Book of) Disquiet: Desassossego, Saudade,...

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2023/09/06

In this episode I re-interrogate my reasons for creating a Book of Disquet cover-version by exploring some of the nuances between the word "desassossego" (restlessness, uneasiness, anxiety) in Portuguese and the English translation which usually renders the word as "disquiet." I also reflect a bit more, with the help of Richard Zenith's recent biography of Pessoa, on Pessoa's melancholy brand of existential unrest which acts in so many ways as a stand-in for the absurdity

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00:26:26

Fragments 12-28

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2023/07/17

Fragment 12: Pessoa sees his random writings as an unimportant autobiography and a way to unwind like solitaire. Fragment 13: Pessoa feels his writings are as insignificant as his life next to the vast universe. Fragment 14: Pessoa says creating imperfect art is better than creating nothing, as it may help others. Fragment 15: Pessoa gradually conquered his innate inner nature through effort. Fragment 16: Pessoa daydreams during a trip, neither seeing the landscapes nor remembering

en

00:30:10

Fragments 1-11

Living The Book of Disquiet ·

2023/07/16

Fragment 1: Pessoa feels like an outsider, finding comfort in examining his feelings. * In what way do you experience yourself as “being on the fringe” of things? Is that a torment for you, or a pleasure, or both? * Do you consider yourself to be “a scholar of feelings”? In what way do you undertake this scholarship? Fragment 2: Pessoa lacks faith in both God and humanity. * What do you believe in? Fragment 3: Contemplating aesthetics consoles Pessoa against life's monotony. * In what way

en

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