The Bittersweet Beauty of Lisbon

Dear friends,

I am on vacation this week, so we are bringing you one of our favorites from the archives — a conversation with Stanford psychiatrist Anna Lembke, one of the world's leading experts on the neuroscience of addiction.

This conversation changed my perspective on my own relationship to pleasure and novelty, specifically the forms of gratification I receive from my smart phone. Anna makes a convincing case that we are all addicted to technology and comfort, and?we can navigate the world better if we understand the neurochemistry of those addictions.?

Listen to our conversation on Apple or Spotify, and let us know what you think in the comments below.

While I have your attention, have you been to Lisbon? I just spent 4 days there, partly because of the following exchange I had last year with Susan Cain during our conversation about her book Bittersweet:

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Rufus: The Portuguese have this concept of saudade: “sweetly piercing nostalgia, often expressed musically, for something deeply cherished long gone that may never have existed in the first place.” That, I thought, was extraordinary.

Susan: It is so extraordinary. And the amazing thing—I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Lisbon?

Rufus: Never.

Susan: You’ve got to go! I love that city so much. They’re so into their concept of saudade that they even name their pastry shops “Saudade.” It’s everywhere. This comes from the fact that this is a city on an ocean, and historically, the men would go out to sea, and there was a sense of, will they or won’t they come back? But then, of course, it exists on a more metaphysical plane as well. It’s a sense of longing for the unattainable.

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The literary hero of Lisbon, and patron saint of “saudade,” is the writer Fernando Pessoa. He wrote,

“The longing for impossible things, precisely because they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been … All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are.”

Pessoa’s internal landscape may have been painful, but the hilly streets of Lisbon are beautiful, with their mosaicked sidewalks, historic streets cars, and brightly colored buildings lit up against an azure sky.

I never tired of the endlessly varied tiles that famously cover many of the buildings in Lisbon, which grow in complexity as your distance from them increases. So it is with Lisbon, and my conversation with Susan

I was smitten by Lisbon, as I was with Susan’s book Bittersweet. If you haven’t listened to our conversation, I think you will enjoy it, but proceed with care -- you may find yourself in Lisbon.