On the Road with Penguin Classics · Penguin Random House UK

The Book of Disquiet with Richard Zenith

October 20, 2022·1 hr 9 min·5 clips

The last words Fernando Pessoa ever wrote, the night before he died, were in English: 'I know not what tomorrow will bring.'

The streets and the soul blur. The episode opens with passages from The Book of Disquiet and treats Lisbon as more than a backdrop. It feels like the outside version of Pessoa's inward life. Bernardo Soares did not exist, but that fact matters less as a trick than as a clue. The assistant bookkeeper becomes one of Pessoa's ways of letting consciousness talk back. The mood stays quietly unsettled. Richard explains how Pessoa resisted the usual narrowing of identity, giving rejected feelings a life on the page instead. The heteronyms become experiments in being. The host calls them paths to self-knowledge, and Richard agrees that each invented figure tests another way to live inside a self. One fragment makes the idea sharper: Pessoa imagines himself as an empty stage where actors perform different plays, turning authorship into inner theatre. The walk keeps moving. After a cab ride through winding streets and steep slopes, the conversation reaches the last house where Pessoa lived for fifteen years. Casa Fernando Pessoa is now a museum, library, and cultural centre, and Clara Ritu welcomes the visitors inside. Biography and place stay tangled. The top-floor exhibition carries on the work of the walk, putting objects on the walls beside the questions raised by Disquiet. Near the end, mortality moves in. The host returns to Richard's chosen closing fragment, picturing Pessoa in his hat, walking away into downtown Lisbon. The final image is plain and lovely: a life of feeling, writing, and vanishing becomes one less passerby on the city's everyday streets.

As heard by us

A thoughtful Lisbon walk through Pessoa's fragments, heteronyms, and vanishing sense of self.

Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet becomes a Lisbon walk through fragments, invented selves, and the odd afterlife of a book its author never lived to shape.

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Why you'd press play

You follow Pessoa best by walking Lisbon, and this episode does exactly that, slowly.

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