Living The Book of Disquiet
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.
Episodes
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 w
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 coll
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
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
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 moul
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 dis
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.
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 Rickman
Fragment 88: The Father of My Soul
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
Fragment 307: Basic Trust (The Song Thrush)
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.
Fragment 32: Lucid Dreaming
“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: R
Fragment 31: Beyond The Pleasure Principle
“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 th
Fragment 30: An Arid Heart
"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."
Fragment 29: Don't Dream It's Over
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 shari
Fragment 144: Sunday Mornin' Coming Down
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 e
Living (The Book of) Disquiet: Desassossego, Saudade, Tedio
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
Fragments 12-28
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.
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