Hello Everyone,
Today, Fernando Pessoa is remembered as nothing less than a colossus of modern European literature, a writer routinely spoken of in the same breath as Kafka, Joyce and Rainer Maria Rilke. And yet, were it not for the posthumous discovery of a nondescript wooden trunk—a trunk which contained some twenty-five thousand pages of unpublished work—his name, alongside the names of his seventy-odd heteronyms, would survive as but an inconsequential footnote in the annals of Portuguese cultural history.
My latest video explores not only the life of this most solitary and idiosyncratic of writers, but also how his fragmented, endlessly proliferating self has become, in our age of avatars and algorithmic alter egos, a near-universal pathology.
As always, you can also check out the video on Bitchute, Rumble, and Odysee, while for those who’d prefer to read, the original article is linked below. If you enjoy either, I would really appreciate if you could give them a like, share or comment, and of course, if this happens to be your first time here at Midnight at the Matinee, please consider subscribing for more.
Thanks a lot for reading,
Carson.
Original Article:
On Substack, Selfhood, and the Fleeting Fiction Called "I"
One of the most famous and most oft-invoked dictums in all of philosophy is the Socratic claim, allegedly uttered at his trial for corrupting Athenian youth, that the unexamined life is not worth living.
Shut up.