“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."

-Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)

Every so often, I sit down and write a letter to Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet and writer.

I not only write but also send each letter to the postal address where Pessoa spent the last fifteen years of his life before dying at the age of 47 with cirrhosis of the liver - most likely due to alcoholism.

He hasn't written back to me yet, but I believe one day he will.

Every podcast is a kind of therapy, every listener a therapist.

"I don't have answers, I have questions."

James Hillman | Archetypal Psychologist-Psychotherapist | Aries | Enneagram Eight - The Challenger | Badass or Jackass?

LINKS:

-The Politics of Feeling sessions

-We've Had 100 Years of Psychotherapy, And The World's Getting Worse (book)