Living The Book of Disquiet – Details, episodes & analysis

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.

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 then it occurs to me that I don’t know him, that perhaps he’s not how I imagine, that perhaps this figure has never been the father of my soul…”

Also on YouTube - for those not able to access the video version of this episode here 🙏🏼🦋

My aspirations for how we might “live” Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet together.

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 shadows of our dreams, their colourful patterns engraving our oblivion on the static surface of the walls. Like every dreamer, I’ve always felt that my calling was to create. Since I’ve never been able to make an effort or carry out an intention, creation for me has always meant dreaming, wanting or desiring, and action has meant dreaming of the acts I wish I could perform.” The walk that Max and I did (in reverse, starting from Chesham) can be found here.

“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, repeating a phrase while falling asleep).

-Finding Beauty in the Mundane: the concept of cultivating a "waking dream" mentality, where one finds wonder and beauty in everyday experiences. Cf. Eckhart Tolle/Nisargadatta.

The Yearning for Connection: Lost loves, and the desire to recapture those feelings of connection and shared experiences. The possibility of finding a similar connection through lucid dreaming.

-Techniques for Lucid Dreaming: dream journaling, sensory deprivation, and meditation.

Life as a Waking Dream: living one’s life as a lucid dream state, rather than feeling trapped in our waking nightmares.

-In The Forest of Estrangement: A text written in 1912 and forming the initial foundations for TBOD according to a letter to João de Lebre e Lima, in which FP talks about his new project. Read both the letter, as well as In The Forest of Estrangement here.

“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 feel.”

This episode begins with a restless nights for two literary alter-egos: Fernando Pessoa's Soares and Richard Matheson's (I Am Legend) Neville.

Pessoa grapples with insomnia, intertwined with alcoholism as well as various existential anxieties in Fragment 31 of The Book of Disquiet, a meditation on sleep, death, and the nature of being.

Neville, the protagonist of Richard Matheson's I Am Legend, finds himself seemingly the last human on Earth, haunted by the undead. His struggle for sleep mirrors Pessoa's, hinting at a similar psychological issue: the manifestation in his life of the Death Drive as explored by Freud in his 1922 essay "Beyond The Pleasure Principle".

Also, a fascinating historical footnote: Pessoa's role in crafting early advertising copy for Coca-Cola in Portugal, resulting in a government ban on Coca-Cola imports that lasted for over 50 years.

"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."

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 productivity, as well as the hunt for Pessoa’s words amid perfectly ordered bookshelves. No system or structure can solve our essential needs.

Notes:

-A day in my life | Lex Fridman

-Living Each Day As A Three Act Play

-Music used in this episode

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 underscores the transient nature of relationships and time.

Links:

Music: Living The Book of Disquiet Playlist on Spotify

Life Answers: A Complete Audiobook Reading of Sri Nisargadatta Maharajah’s “I Am That”

Lomakayu's reading on YouTube of "I Am That"

Huberman & Conti's How To Understand & Assess Your Mental Health series (treasure trove of ideas and wisdom here, worth at least a year of therapy in each episode!)

Agnes Callard & Robin Hanson's Minds Almost Meeting

Raymond Carver's Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

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 and tedium of modern life, making The Book of Disquiet the modernist masterpiece that it is.

Pessoa self-medicated his deep-seated disquiet through writing, smoking, alcohol and coffee. Alcohol, we might say, acts as a kind of liquid heteronym in this book, medicating away the pain of "tedio" (tedium, boredom, monotony), another crucial word in the Pessoan lexicon (he uses it 131 times in his Livro do Desassossego).

References:

-"Chega de Saudade" (Jobim/Moraes) sung by João Gilberto in 1959

-Pessoa: An Experimental Life (2021) by Richard Zenith

-Cyril Connolly's The Unquiet Grave

-Article about The Real with regard to our daily routines

-"People would rather be electrically shocked than left alone with their thoughts" (article)

-Andrew Bird's "Sisyphus"