"A literatura, como toda a arte, é uma confissão de que a vida não basta." — Fernando Pessoa, Livro do Desassossego

"Scandalizzare è un diritto; essere scandalizzati è un piacere." ("To scandalize is a right; to be scandalized is a pleasure.") — Pier Paolo Pasolini

Introduction: Why Read Pessoa Through Pasolini?

At first glance, bringing Fernando Pessoa and Pier Paolo Pasolini into the same essay may seem like an odd critical pairing. Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego is an inward, fragmentary, and anti-narrative meditation on consciousness, fatigue, urban routine, and metaphysical unease. Pasolini, by contrast, is commonly remembered through the visible force of his public polemics, his films of scandal and sacred contradiction, and his attention to bodies, class, ideology, and the violence of modern consumer society. One writer appears to move toward the interior abyss; the other toward the historical street, the profaned sacred, and the political body. Yet the distance between them is precisely what makes the comparison fruitful. If Pasolini is reduced only to cinematic provocation or to his representation of the Roman subproletariat, then the bridge to Pessoa becomes weak. If, however, Pasolini is understood more broadly as a critic of bourgeois normalization, cultural homogenization, spiritual depletion, and the destruction of authentic forms of life, then Livro do Desassossego begins to reveal an unexpectedly rich Pasolinian afterlife.

This essay, my 576^th post on my edublog, argues that Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego can be read productively through six adapted Pasolinian strategies: marginality, bourgeois critique, the sacred, linguistic contamination, provocation, and nostalgia for authenticity. Yet each of these must be translated into Pessoa’s register. In Livro do Desassossego, marginality is not primarily subproletarian but existential and urban; bourgeois hypocrisy becomes bourgeois emptiness and the metaphysics of routine; the sacred appears not as doctrinal faith but as the wound left by transcendence’s recession; Pasolini’s collision of high and low language becomes, in Pessoa, a formal contamination of genres, tonal registers, and prose modes; shock no longer takes the form of corporeal scandal but of inward disintegration; and nostalgia for lost authenticity becomes a poetics of alienation and non-coincidence with life. Read in this way, Bernardo Soares’s fragments cease to be merely the private notebook of a melancholy clerk and emerge instead as a subtle but devastating critique of modern anthropological loss.

A Pasolinian framework becomes especially compelling when one considers the critical force of Scritti corsari and Lettere luterane. In these late essays, Pasolini repeatedly argues that postwar consumer society has produced a new and more insidious form of domination, one that no longer relies primarily on explicit coercion but on standardization, hedonistic conformity, and the destruction of older symbolic worlds. Alexandre Pilati (2016), in his study of Scritti corsari, emphasizes Pasolini’s diagnosis of a “new fascism” rooted in consumer society and cultural homologation rather than in the older political forms of authoritarianism. Georg Seeßlen (2021) similarly underscores Pasolini’s resistance to the “consumistic” rule of petit-bourgeois modernity and his insistence that the apparent freedoms of the new order often conceal a deeper anthropological violence. Pasolini’s concern, then, is not only with politics in a narrow sense, but with what modern civilization does to language, desire, memory, the sacred, and the body. This broader Pasolinian horizon is what makes him so unexpectedly illuminating for Pessoa. Bernardo Soares does not denounce consumer fascism in journalistic prose, but he records with uncanny precision what a spiritually thinned modernity feels like from the inside.

Pessoa, Bernardo Soares, and the Modern Condition of Fragmented Consciousness

Before moving into the six Pasolinian strategies, it is worth recalling that Livro do Desassossego is itself a formally unstable object. It is not a finished novel, nor a diary in the ordinary sense, nor a simple collection of aphorisms. It is a posthumous constellation of fragments associated above all with Bernardo Soares, Pessoa’s “semi-heteronym,” though the work’s editorial history also involves other textual strata and the shadow of Vicente Guedes. This instability matters because any reading of the book must resist the temptation to force it into a single generic or ideological mold. The book is fragmentary not only because Pessoa left it unfinished, but because fragmentation is one of its deepest formal truths: the modern self, the modern city, and the modern relation to meaning appear in pieces.

Several scholars have stressed precisely this dimension. Luciana Paiva Coronel (2007) argues that the prose-poetic fragmentation of Livro do Desassossego is central to its modernity, since the work’s form registers the conflict between modern and antimodern impulses. Diego Giménez (2016) likewise reads the book in relation to urban materiality and modern life, while Karen Adorno (2022) interprets boredom in the work as a symptom of modernity rather than merely a private temperament. What unites these approaches is the recognition that Pessoa’s introspection is never purely private. Even when Bernardo Soares appears to be speaking only about himself, the fragments also register a civilization: office labor, rented rooms, repetitive streets, abstract time, emotional fatigue, and the difficult coexistence of lucidity and paralysis. It is precisely here that Pasolini becomes useful. His work reminds us that the damage modernity inflicts is often anthropological before it is overtly political. Pessoa’s genius lies in showing what that damage looks like when it settles into the nerves of a clerk.

1. Marginality Recast: Bernardo Soares and the Urban Condition of Invisibility

Pasolini’s first major strategy is to place the marginalized at the center of representation. In Pasolini’s fiction and film, this often means the urban poor, the subproletariat, sex workers, delinquent youths, and bodies excluded from bourgeois respectability. Pessoa’s Bernardo Soares is obviously not marginal in that same material and social sense. He is not an Accattone figure, nor does he inhabit the scandalized edges of legality or public morality. Yet to stop there would be to miss the deeper transferability of the strategy. If Pasolini’s marginality is redefined not as class marginality alone but as a position of structural non-centrality within modern life, Soares becomes an extraordinarily suggestive figure.

Bernardo Soares is socially minor. He is an assistant bookkeeper, a man whose public role is almost designed to disappear into routine. He inhabits Lisbon not as a hero, not as a public intellectual, and not even as a rebel, but as a barely visible functionary whose inner life vastly exceeds the social significance assigned to him. One of the most revealing fragments captures this strange relation between social smallness and textual selfhood:

“Sou, em grande parte, a mesma prosa que escrevo. Desenrolo-me em períodos e parágrafos, faço-me pontuações, e, na distribuição desencadeada das imagens, visto-me, como as crianças, de rei com papel de jornal, ou, no modo como faço ritmo de uma série de palavras, me touco, como os loucos, de flores secas que continuam vivas nos meus sonhos” (Pessoa, 2015, frag. 148).

This is one of the passages that most clearly invites a Pasolinian reading. Soares does not present himself as a socially substantial person who later chooses to write. Rather, he becomes writing because ordinary life has failed to provide a sufficient site of presence. He “unrolls” himself into periods and paragraphs because his social existence is too thin to hold him. In a very different key, Pasolini often grants dignity and visibility to those who are denied symbolic centrality by dominant society. Pessoa does something analogous, but the mechanism is interiorized: Soares is not a public outcast; he is an urban residue, a consciousness that survives by turning itself into prose.

This is where the comparison becomes especially interesting for literary criticism. A Pasolinian reading does not require us to pretend that Soares belongs to the same world as Pasolini’s Roman ragazzi. It asks a different question: what happens to the subject in a civilization where exclusion no longer needs to be spectacular? Soares is not violently expelled from society; he is gently reduced to insignificance by the structures of routine, office work, and urban anonymity. Lucia Helena (2014) helps illuminate this point by reading the Livro through the tragic problem of the modern self. Soares is not “marginal” because he lacks consciousness, but because his consciousness has no adequate worldly habitation. He is included in the city and excluded from full belonging at the same time.

This adaptation of Pasolini’s first strategy matters because it keeps us from romanticizing Bernardo Soares as a purely metaphysical dreamer detached from history. His invisibility is historical. He belongs to a modern social order in which one can be neither poor enough to be scandalous nor powerful enough to matter, and yet still feel one’s life dissolving into abstraction. The pathos of Soares lies precisely there. He is a minor employee carrying within himself a civilization-sized fatigue.

2. Bourgeois Emptiness and the Metaphysics of Routine

If Pasolini’s second strategy is to expose bourgeois hypocrisy, Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego invites a crucial modification: the most striking target is not hypocrisy in the dramatic sense, but bourgeois emptiness. The book rarely stages the revelation of hidden scandal beneath public respectability. Instead, it anatomizes a world in which ordinary bourgeois existence has become spiritually and affectively anaemic. Offices, timetables, streets, commercial transactions, furnished rooms, and habitual gestures create a life that is socially legible and inwardly exhausted. In Pessoa, modernity often appears less as moral corruption than as a draining atmosphere.

A fragment that captures this with remarkable economy reads:

“No quarto à moderna, deserto até ele próprio, o tédio torna-se desconforto, mágoa física. E, no meu espírito, onde sonho o que não ouso querer, o cansaço torna-se uma coisa real, uma coisa como uma dor, como uma doença” (Pessoa, 2015, frag. 270).

What matters here is the fusion of space, affect, and historical diagnosis. The “quarto à moderna” is not merely a neutral setting; it is a symptom. The room is “deserted even by itself,” as though modern space had become estranged from its own possibility of habitation. Tedium is not an incidental mood but a physical sorrow. This is where a denser Pasolinian framework proves especially illuminating. In Scritti corsari and Lettere luterane, Pasolini repeatedly argues that the new consumerist bourgeois order does not simply repress; it reorganizes experience from within. It standardizes desire, flattens symbolic life, and substitutes managed comfort for genuine vitality. Pilati (2016) emphasizes that Pasolini’s diagnosis of the “new fascism” lies precisely in this transformation of consciousness through consumption and homologation rather than through overt ideological command. Seeßlen (2021) likewise notes that Pasolini perceives a “consumistic” petit-bourgeois order that absorbs difference and produces a new form of anthropological conformity.

Pessoa does not write polemical essays against consumer capitalism, but Soares’s fragments often feel like the phenomenology of the subject produced by such a world avant la lettre. Karen Adorno (2022) is particularly helpful here, since her study of boredom in Livro do Desassossego frames tedium as a symptom of modernity rather than merely of temperament. Soares’s boredom is not laziness. It is the affective form of a life hollowed out by routine and by the impossibility of full investment in the structures that organize it. He goes to the office, performs his tasks, walks the city, returns to his room, and yet the very continuity of these actions produces metaphysical nausea rather than a sense of order.

The phrase “metaphysics of routine” is useful because Pessoa’s critique of bourgeois life does not operate through satire alone. He does not simply ridicule office work or middle-class existence. He shows how repetition enters the soul and converts time into a dull pressure. Bourgeois life, in this book, is not scandalous because it is secretly immoral; it is scandalous because it can be lived outwardly without catastrophe while inwardly becoming uninhabitable. This is one of the places where Pessoa and Pasolini touch most powerfully. Both recognize that modern domination may appear not as overt brutality but as a soft devastation of the spirit.

3. The Sacred as Wound: Desassossego and the Recession of Transcendence

One of the richest points of contact between Pasolini and Pessoa lies in the question of the sacred. Pasolini’s relation to religion is famously paradoxical. He is anti-clerical, Marxist, and scandalously irreverent, yet he remains deeply attached to the sacred as a category of human experience, one bound up with ritual, bodily reality, symbolic density, and the resistance of pre-bourgeois worlds to modern flattening. Francesca Cadel (2012) has shown how Pasolini’s transnational visions of the sacred and tradition emerge precisely as alternatives to the hegemony of Western neocapitalism. The sacred, for Pasolini, is not reducible to doctrine; it is a mode of intensity, contradiction, and human depth that consumer modernity threatens to erase.

Pessoa’s Livro do Desassossego is not a religious book in any straightforward sense, yet it is saturated with the afterlife of transcendence. What Soares experiences is often not faith but the pain of its recession, the lingering structure of a need that modern consciousness can neither satisfy nor abolish. One of the most revealing fragments states:

“Nasci em um tempo em que a maioria dos jovens haviam perdido a crença em Deus, pela mesma razão que os seus maiores a tinham tido — sem saber por quê. E então, porque o espírito humano tende naturalmente para criticar porque sente, e não porque pensa, a maioria desses jovens escolheu a Humanidade para sucedâneo de Deus” (Pessoa, 2015, frag. 12).

This passage deserves slow reading. Soares does not celebrate unbelief as emancipation. He diagnoses a historical moment in which belief and disbelief alike risk becoming inherited habits rather than lived convictions. The problem is not merely that God has disappeared; it is that modern subjects no longer know how to inhabit either transcendence or its absence with seriousness. The substitution of “Humanity” for God is not presented as a triumphant secular achievement but as a compensatory gesture, another way of filling a vacancy without confronting it.

Antonio Geraldo Cantarela (2016) is especially useful here because he demonstrates how divine language in Livro do Desassossego functions not as stable theology but as part of the book’s stylistic and metaphysical restlessness. In Soares, God is frequently present as a question, a shadow, or a linguistic trace of loss. A Pasolinian reading sharpens this insight by showing that the sacred in Pessoa is less a doctrinal reality than a wound in consciousness, a sign that modern life has become too administratively organized, too psychologically abstract, and too spiritually thinned to sustain the old symbolic densities. In Pasolini, the sacred often survives as contradiction: something mocked, desired, profaned, and mourned at once. In Pessoa, it survives as desassossego, as a metaphysical dissatisfaction that no secular routine can appease.

What is especially striking is that this recession of transcendence is never treated as merely philosophical. It affects mood, temporality, and the body. The loss of the sacred is not only an idea; it is a way of moving through rooms and streets with an unnamed insufficiency. Soares’s metaphysical hunger is inseparable from his urban fatigue. This is one of the deepest affinities between Pasolini and Pessoa: both understand that the sacred, once displaced, does not simply vanish. It returns as absence, as unease, as the sense that modern civilization has solved many practical problems while leaving the soul undernourished.

4. Formal Contamination: From Pasolini’s High and Low Language to Pessoa’s Fragmentary Instability

Pasolini’s fourth strategy, the mixing of high and low language, cannot be transferred to Pessoa without modification. Pasolini’s linguistic politics often involve a deliberate contamination of literary discourse with dialect, slang, and subproletarian speech in order to resist bourgeois purification and to grant symbolic weight to marginalized forms of life. Bernardo Soares does not speak in dialect, and Livro do Desassossego does not wage its war through sociolinguistic collision in the same way. Yet something analogous happens at the level of form, tone, and generic instability. Pessoa’s prose continually contaminates one literary mode with another: diary with essay, confession with aphorism, urban sketch with prose poem, philosophical reflection with hallucinatory reverie.

One of the passages that best illustrates this formal self-awareness is again the fragment in which Soares defines himself through prose, but here another portion becomes relevant:

“Desenrolo-me em períodos e parágrafos, faço-me pontuações… E, acima de tudo, estou tranquilo, como um boneco de serradura que, tomando consciência de si mesmo, abanasse de vez em quando a cabeça para que o guizo no alto do boné em bico fizesse soar qualquer coisa, vida tinida do morto, aviso mínimo ao Destino” (Pessoa, 2015, frag. 148).

The extraordinary image of the “boneco de serradura” captures Pessoa’s anti-unified poetics with unusual force. The self is not a coherent autobiographical subject who later arranges experience into language; it is already punctuational, already fragmented, already a constructed object whose momentary consciousness produces only a faint ringing, “vida tinida do morto.” In Pasolini’s terms, one might say that Pessoa’s prose refuses the purified continuity of bourgeois discourse. It does not present a stable voice calmly recounting a stable life. Instead, it stages a contamination of ontological registers: living and dead, puppet and consciousness, prose and self, rhythm and identity.

Luciana Paiva Coronel (2007) helps clarify why this matters. She argues that the modernity of Livro do Desassossego lies partly in its prose-poetic instability and in the way its form embodies contradiction. That instability can be read through Pasolini’s notion of contaminazione, even if the terms are not identical. Pasolini’s contamination breaks the boundaries between vulgar and sublime, dialect and literary speech, myth and contemporary discourse. Pessoa’s contamination breaks the boundaries between literary genres, psychic registers, and modes of being. The effect is similar in one crucial sense: both writers resist the fantasy that modern subjectivity can be represented through a homogeneous, polished, socially neutral language.

Paolo D’Achille’s (2023) study of Pasolini’s essayistic language is useful in this context because it highlights how Pasolini’s prose itself is polemical, hybrid, and linguistically inventive. Pasolini does not merely theorize contamination; he performs it. Pessoa, too, performs his own version of formal impurity. Livro do Desassossego cannot be reduced to one genre because Soares cannot be reduced to one self. The book’s instability is not a flaw but an epistemological necessity. Modern consciousness, in Pessoa, no longer possesses the unity required for a seamless narrative. Fragmentation becomes the only honest form.

5. Shock Without Spectacle: Inward Disintegration as Literary Provocation

Pasolini’s fifth strategy, provocation and shock, may initially seem among the least applicable to Pessoa. Pasolini’s art often scandalizes through the body, through explicit representations of power, sexuality, and violence, and through the profanation of social and religious taboos. Bernardo Soares does none of this. There is no equivalent in Livro do Desassossego to the bodily extremity of Salò or the cinematic force of Pasolini’s public affronts. Yet to conclude that Pessoa lacks Pasolinian provocation would be to confuse scandal with shock. Pessoa’s provocation is quieter and, in some ways, more difficult to escape because it occurs inside consciousness itself.

One of the most devastating fragments reads:

“O cansaço de todas as ilusões e de tudo que há nas ilusões — a perda delas, a inutilidade de as ter, o antecansaço de ter que as ter para perdê-las, a mágoa de as ter tido, a vergonha intelectual de as ter tido sabendo que teriam tal fim” (Pessoa, 2015, frag. 327).

This is a perfect example of Pessoa’s inward violence. The sentence does not simply state that the speaker is tired. It anatomizes exhaustion with almost surgical cruelty, moving from the loss of illusions to the shame of ever having possessed them. The cumulative syntax traps the reader inside a consciousness that not only suffers disappointment but anticipates and critiques its own disappointment in advance. What is shocking here is not obscenity but overconsciousness. Soares cannot merely lose illusions; he must also endure the “vergonha intelectual” of having known from the beginning that they would collapse. The self becomes a tribunal from which there is no appeal.

Lucia Helena’s (2014) reflections on the tragic “eu” in Pessoa are especially relevant at this point because they help frame desassossego as a procedure of self-exposure rather than a theme alone. Pessoa does not comfort the reader with a narrative of overcoming. He radicalizes discomfort by making consciousness witness its own fracture in real time. This is where Pasolini becomes unexpectedly illuminating. In Pasolini, provocation often aims to destroy the spectator’s moral complacency by exposing the obscene underside of power. In Pessoa, provocation destroys another kind of complacency: the bourgeois fantasy that inward life is a stable refuge. The interior self, far from being a sanctuary, becomes a site of decomposition.

Brian DeGrazia’s (2018) discussion of Salò is helpful by contrast because it reminds us that Pasolini’s shock is not mere sensationalism; it is a strategy for revealing structures of domination and the complicity of pleasure with violence. Pessoa’s strategy is different, but it shares the same refusal of consolation. Livro do Desassossego shocks by making visible a subject who can neither live innocently nor die symbolically, a subject condemned to analyze himself past the point of endurance. If Pasolini scandalizes the body in order to expose modern power, Pessoa scandalizes consciousness in order to expose modern emptiness. The scale changes; the radicality does not.

6. Nostalgia for Authentic Life: Alienation, Delay, and the Impossibility of Full Presence

The sixth Pasolinian strategy, the longing for lost authenticity and the critique of cultural homogenization, may be the most productive of all when adapted to Pessoa. Pasolini repeatedly mourns the destruction of older, embodied, communal, and symbolically dense forms of life by consumer modernity. His nostalgia is never simply conservative; it is tied to a sense that something anthropologically vital has been flattened by the new order of standardization and false liberation. Pessoa’s version of this concern is less collective and less explicitly historical, but it is unmistakably present. Livro do Desassossego is haunted by the feeling that modern life has become second-hand, abstract, and difficult to inhabit directly. Soares does not merely fail to live; he experiences modern subjectivity itself as a structure of delay.

A striking fragment makes this clear:

“Tenho assistido, incógnito, ao desfalecimento gradual da minha vida, ao sossobro lento de tudo quanto quis ser. Posso dizer, com aquela verdade que não tem literatura, que não houve tragédia na minha vida. O que houve foi qualquer coisa de cinzento, de inútil e de disperso, como o destino de uma folha seca que cai entre o que não é” (Pessoa, 2015, frag. 148).

Few passages capture the anti-heroic tragedy of Livro do Desassossego as powerfully as this one. Soares has not suffered a dramatic catastrophe. There is no grand downfall, no melodramatic betrayal, no public ruin. Instead, there is a “gradual fainting” of life, a slow shipwreck of everything he wanted to be. The most devastating detail may be the insistence that there was “no tragedy” in the conventional sense, only something gray, useless, and dispersed. This is precisely why the fragment resonates so strongly with a Pasolinian framework. Modernity’s damage, in both writers, often appears not as a single catastrophic event but as an attritional erosion of presence.

Carolina Rodrigues Freitas (2020), in her study of embodiment, description, and epiphany in Livro do Desassossego, offers a valuable corrective to readings that treat Pessoa as purely cerebral. Her work shows how sensory life and the body remain crucial even within Soares’s introspective universe. This matters because alienation in Pessoa is not a simple withdrawal from the world; it is the painful inability to coincide with a world one still perceives vividly. The city is there, the body is there, weather and objects are there, but presence keeps slipping into observation. Soares can feel, imagine, and describe, but he struggles to inhabit.

Here Pasolini’s notion of anthropological loss becomes particularly illuminating. Pessoa is not mourning peasant dialects or pre-capitalist communal life in the way Pasolini sometimes does. What he mourns is no less radical: the possibility of living one’s own experience without permanent mediation. Modern life turns the subject into spectator of himself. It encourages analysis, delay, self-division, and the replacement of lived intensity with imagined or written compensation. Soares’s dreams are not simply creative resources; they are also substitutes for a life that refuses to become fully real.

This is where a more humanized reading of Pessoa matters. It is easy to speak abstractly of alienation, but Livro do Desassossego continually returns alienation to the scale of ordinary fatigue: a room, a desk, a walk through Lisbon, a sentence that cannot decide whether it wants to console or condemn the self. The poignancy of the book lies in that disproportion between the apparent smallness of its materials and the enormity of what they register. In Soares, the modern subject does not lose authenticity in one dramatic rupture. He loses it slowly, by becoming unable to live except through the side door of reflection.

Conclusion: Pessoa, Pasolini, and the Interior History of Modern Loss

Reading Livro do Desassossego through Pasolini does not mean transforming Bernardo Soares into a political pamphleteer or pretending that Pessoa’s fragmentary modernism is secretly a form of Italian Marxist cultural criticism. The value of the comparison lies elsewhere. Pasolini provides a vocabulary for naming the historical and anthropological stakes of experiences that Pessoa renders with incomparable inward precision. Through adapted Pasolinian strategies, Livro do Desassossego emerges as far more than a notebook of private melancholy. It becomes a literary anatomy of modern diminishment: of invisibility without spectacle, routine without meaning, sacred absence without transcendence, language without stable form, inwardness without refuge, and longing without a recoverable object.

What this essay has tried to show is that the six Pasolinian strategies, once carefully translated, help reveal the social and spiritual density of Pessoa’s prose. Marginality becomes urban invisibility; bourgeois hypocrisy becomes bourgeois emptiness; the sacred becomes wound; linguistic contamination becomes formal instability; shock becomes inward disintegration; nostalgia becomes the poetics of alienated delay. None of these adaptations erases the difference between the two authors. On the contrary, the comparison works precisely because Pessoa and Pasolini approach modernity from different angles. Pasolini often attacks it from the outside, through polemic, spectacle, and the violated body. Pessoa records it from within, through fatigue, syntax, and the quiet terror of a life that keeps receding from itself.

For me, that is where the comparison becomes most compelling. Pessoa’s assistant bookkeeper and Pasolini’s polemical outsider inhabit different worlds, yet both know that modern civilization does not only change institutions; it changes the texture of being human. It teaches people how to desire, how to speak, how to forget, how to live in rooms, how to endure boredom, and how to mistake survival for presence. Livro do Desassossego matters because it gives this process an interior language. Pasolini matters because he reminds us that such interior states are never merely private. They are historical deposits, symptoms of a civilization that can make a life outwardly orderly while inwardly reducing it to gray dispersion. Between Pessoa and Pasolini, then, what comes into view is not only a theory of literature, but a theory of modern loss, one written partly in essays, partly in poetic prose, and partly in philosophical fragments, but always in the uneasy knowledge that the most decisive forms of violence are not always loud.

San José, Costa Rica

Monday, July 27, 2026

📚 References

Adorno, K. (2022). Tédio e modernidade no Livro do desassossego, de Fernando Pessoa. Interseções: Revista de Estudos Interdisciplinares, 24(2). https://doi.org/10.12957/irei.2022.70836

Cadel, F. (2012). Outside Italy: Pasolini’s transnational visions of the sacred and tradition. In P. Antonello & F. Mussgnug (Eds.), The scandal of self-contradiction: Pasolini’s multistable subjectivities, geographies, traditions (pp. 151–165). Peter Lang. https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-06_09

Cantarela, A. G. (2016). Deus e deuses nos meandros do Livro do Desassossego: Uma função do estilo. Teoliteraria: Revista de Literaturas e Teologias, 5(10), 48–75. https://doi.org/10.19143/2236-9937.2016v5n10p48-75

Coronel, L. P. (2007). A modernidade da prosa poética do Livro do desassossego, de Fernando Pessoa. Educação, Ciência e Cultura, 12(1). https://revistas.unilasalle.edu.br/index.php/Educacao/article/view/10

D’Achille, P. (2023). La scrittura di un eretico corsaro. L’italiano di Pasolini saggista e pubblicista. Moderna Språk, 117(2), 37–62. https://doi.org/10.58221/mosp.v117i2.14497

DeGrazia, B. (2018). To hell with narrative: Inferno and irony in Pasolini’s Salò. The Italianist, 38(2), 204–220. https://doi.org/10.1080/02614340.2018.1477310

Freitas, C. R. (2020). Aonde o sentir nos leva: Embodiment, ekphrasis, descrição e epifania no Livro do desassossego, de Fernando Pessoa. Navegações, 13(2). https://doi.org/10.15448/1983-4276.2020.2.37025

Giménez, D. (2016). Materialidade e modernidade no Livro do Desassossego. Terra Roxa e Outras Terras: Revista de Estudos Literários, 32, 8–18. https://doi.org/10.5433/1678-2054.2016v32p8

Helena, L. (2014). O “eu” e o Livro do Desassossego: Reflexões em torno de Augusto dos Anjos e Fernando Pessoa. Matraga, 21(35). https://www.e-publicacoes.uerj.br/index.php/matraga/article/view/17486

Pessoa, F. (2013). Livro do desassossego. Nostrum Editora.
[Reading edition used by the present reader.]

Pessoa, F. (2015). Livro do desassossego (R. Zenith, Org.). Assírio & Alvim.
[Used in this essay as the scholarly anchor for quotations and fragment consistency.]

Pilati, A. (2016). A reflexão sobre o fascismo nos Scritti corsari de Pier Paolo Pasolini. Exlibris. https://revistas.filo.uba.ar/index.php/exlibris/article/view/483

Seeßlen, G. (2021). Pasolini: Fascism – consumism – Catholicism: And a search for life. Studia Litteraria et Historica, 10. https://doi.org/10.11649/slh.2574

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Introduction

In English language teaching, published materials often promise efficiency, structure, and pedagogical reliability. Though this sounds promising, for many teachers, especially those working with adult learners in online settings, ready-made materials rarely arrive as finished products. They just arrive as possibilities. They offer a starting point, not a final answer. This tension became particularly clear to me while taking the British Council’s TeachingEnglish: How to Adapt Resources course. One of the course units, focused on adapting and selecting lesson plans, invited teachers to reflect on how they search for materials online, why lesson plans often need adaptation, and how such materials can be reshaped for lower-resource contexts, large classes, and inclusive teaching. Although the course often speaks to school-based settings and younger learners, its central message remains highly relevant for teachers like me who work with young adults and working professionals online.

I found myself both aligned with and distant from the course at the same time. I agreed with the course’s emphasis on contextual relevance, learner inclusion, and teacher flexibility; however, I also realized that many examples need more refining when transferred to the world of online university classes and corporate English instruction. In my context, adaptation is not simply a matter of replacing a worksheet or simplifying a task. It is a pedagogical act of translation: translating materials created for one context into tasks that respond to adult schedules, workplace realities, digital fatigue, and the communicative priorities of learners who often come to class after a full day of work. This essay, my 575^th post on my edublog, argues that adapting lesson plans for online adult learners requires more than methodological creativity. It requires contextual reading, selective use of online resources, differentiation, and a willingness to co-create learning experiences that are professionally relevant, inclusive, and sustainable for both teacher and learner.

Searching for lesson plans: from abundance to relevance

The British Council course begins by offering practical guidance on how teachers can search for lesson plans online. It recommends searching by topic, age, level, and teaching purpose, and then evaluating whether a lesson can be used as it is or whether it needs adaptation. This guidance is sensible, especially in a digital environment where the amount of available material can be overwhelming. However, abundance does not equal relevance. The challenge is not simply finding a lesson plan but finding one that can survive contact with one’s actual learners.

My own reflection in the course makes this tension explicit: apart from looking for pictures to use in PowerPoint presentations, I “barely look for materials online,” particularly because many of them are not suitable for my online college students or my online corporate learners (Acuña Solano, 2026). Instead, I tend to begin with the coursebook and then adapt, expand, or transform it with the support of AI tools such as ChatGPT. When I do search online, I usually search for grammar points, charts, infographics, or explanations that I can modify to suit my two main teaching scenarios. This habit reveals something important: for teachers of adults, searching for resources is rarely about locating a ready-to-use lesson in a single category such as “travel” or “food.” It is more often about locating adaptable fragments, visuals, prompts, scenarios, explanations, and task ideas, that can be repurposed into a lesson with clearer relevance to learners’ academic or professional realities.

This perspective resonates with the British Council’s broader view that existing lesson plans can save preparation time, but only if teachers evaluate and adapt them for their own context (British Council, n.d.). Claire Ross (n.d.), writing for TeachingEnglish, similarly emphasizes that selecting and adapting resources must begin with an understanding of context, teacher needs, and expected outcomes. In other words, a lesson plan is not “good” in the abstract; it is useful only insofar as it fits a concrete teaching situation. For adult online teachers, that fit depends on questions such as these: Does the lesson acknowledge learners’ professional goals? Can it be delivered effectively in a synchronous online class? Does it assume physical classroom movement, shared printed handouts, or child-centered topics that would alienate adult learners? Does it help students communicate in contexts they actually inhabit?

These questions have gradually become part of my own informal checklist whenever I encounter online materials. The issue is not whether a lesson plan looks polished, but whether it can be recontextualized without losing its pedagogical value. In this sense, searching for lesson plans is less about consumption and more about discernment.

Why adaptation is pedagogically necessary

The British Council course invites teachers to think about why published materials often need adaptation and offers several reasons: limited resources, large classes, learners with different needs, and cultural relevance. These are essential concerns, but in my reflective journaling I felt the need to expand the list. In my context, adaptation is also shaped by internet connectivity, the downloading format of the material, job-related relevance, and the need to introduce “twists” that make the content meaningful for working adults. These additions may seem practical rather than theoretical, yet they are deeply pedagogical because they determine whether learning can happen at all.

Adult learners bring with them constraints that are different from those of children or adolescents. Many attend class after work, between family obligations, or while managing professional stress. Some need English for meetings, presentations, interviews, negotiations, or email communication; others need it for academic advancement. Their motivation is often high, but their time and cognitive energy are limited. This means that a lesson plan that is linguistically sound may still fail if it ignores learners’ professional identities or if it requires a level of preparation, emotional investment, or playful participation that does not fit the moment in which adults are learning.

Knowles’s (1984) principles of andragogy remain useful here. Adult learners, he argues, tend to be self-directed and problem-oriented, and they value learning that is immediately relevant to their lives. In language teaching, this suggests that adaptation should not only simplify or personalize content; it should also increase functional relevance in terms of work-related scenarios. A speaking activity about “planning a school picnic” may be harmless, but for corporate learners it may be far less motivating than a role-play about disagreeing diplomatically in a meeting, giving feedback to a colleague, or handling a project delay. Likewise, a reading lesson on childhood routines may be less compelling for university students than a task about professional burnout, remote collaboration, or the ethics of AI at work.

In that sense, adaptation is not a secondary act performed after “real teaching” has been planned. It is central to planning itself. Tomlinson (2013) argues that materials development should be driven by learner needs, affective engagement, and opportunities for meaningful use of language. When published materials do not fully address those needs, teachers must intervene wisely and promptly. That intervention may involve changing the topic, adjusting the task sequence, rewriting instructions, adding scaffolding, replacing examples, or altering the output expected from learners. The goal is not to disrespect the original material, but to bring it into dialogue with the teaching reality at hand.

Lower-resource contexts and the online classroom: a necessary reframing

One of the most interesting sections of the British Council course discusses how to adapt lesson plans for lower-resource contexts. It addresses situations where teachers may not have access to a projector, photocopier, internet connection, or audio equipment. These examples are highly relevant worldwide, yet they need to be reinterpreted for online teaching. In my course reflection, I noted that I could not meaningfully select any of the listed resources because the online environment restructures the question altogether. In a virtual classroom, students may use paper or digital notes; there is no need for scissors, photocopiers, or a separate audio player; and if there is no internet, there is no synchronous class (Acuña Solano, 2026). Computers or tablets are not optional extras but conditions for participation.

This does not mean that online teaching is a high-resource paradise. It simply means that resource constraints take a different form. In virtual adult classes, the real limitations often involve unstable connectivity, camera fatigue, poor audio, limited digital literacy, lack of privacy at home, and uneven access to time and attention (Acuña Solano, 2026). A lesson plan that assumes smooth breakout-room transitions, collaborative online whiteboards, constant screen sharing, and simultaneous use of several platforms may be technically impressive but pedagogically fragile. Therefore, adapting for a lower-resource online context often means simplifying the digital architecture of the lesson rather than adding more tools (Acuña Solano, 2026).

For instance, instead of requiring learners to move across multiple websites, an adult online teacher might set up a lesson around a single slide deck, a chat box, and a pair-work discussion. Instead of assigning a collaborative poster on an external platform, the teacher might ask learners to orally summarize, compare options, or type key points in the chat. Instead of depending on a sophisticated listening platform, the teacher may read a text aloud, use a short self-recorded audio clip, or ask learners to take roles and simulate a dialogue. In this sense, the spirit of the British Council’s advice still applies: good lessons do not depend on how much technology one has, but on how teachers engage learners and help them use language meaningfully (Acuña Solano, 2026).

What changes is the form of adaptation. In the online adult classroom, adaptation often means stripping away digital excess so that communication can remain central. It means recognizing that every additional platform increases cognitive load. It also means understanding that a beautifully designed task can fail if it asks too much of learners who are already dividing their attention between work messages, family responsibilities, and the demands of being visibly present on screen.

Differentiation, mixed ability, and inclusive design for adults

If one idea from the course aligns especially strongly with my own teaching, it is the emphasis on inclusion and differentiation. The course asks teachers to reflect on learners with different abilities, needs, and preferences. In my own practice, mixed-ability teaching is one of the defining realities of university-level and adult online instruction. Students often enter the same class with different experience levels in English, different confidence levels, different professional backgrounds, and different relationships to speaking. Some are quick, verbal, and willing to take risks; others are thoughtful but hesitant, accurate but slow, or highly competent readers who struggle to speak spontaneously.

Rather than treating this variation as a problem to be erased, I have increasingly treated it as a design principle. In my course reflection, I explained that instead of creating a single speaking activity for the whole class, I create six sketchpads and allow students to choose two of them. This gives them a measure of agency and lets them engage with topics they find more meaningful. In corporate classes, I often create six scenarios based on workplace dilemmas so that learners can discuss situations that feel closer to their own professional world (Acuña Solano, 2026). This is, in essence, differentiation through choice.

The British Council’s adaptation guide highlights several forms of differentiation: changing content, process, and product; providing scaffolding; and extending tasks for those who need more challenge (British Council, 2025). These principles are highly compatible with adult online teaching. Tomlinson’s (2014) model of differentiated instruction similarly emphasizes flexible pathways toward shared learning goals. Not all learners need the same route to reach the same destination. In an online speaking lesson, for example, differentiation may involve offering two versions of a prompt, allowing learners to choose between discussing a case study or a personal scenario, giving sentence starters to those who need support, or inviting stronger learners to reformulate or expand ideas more critically.

Importantly, differentiation in adult classes should not feel infantilizing. Adults usually do not want visibly “easy” tasks that expose them as weaker learners. What tends to work better is layered design: tasks that are open enough to allow learners to participate at different depths. A discussion question such as “How should a manager respond to an employee who consistently misses deadlines?” can generate simple answers from a lower-level student and nuanced responses from a more advanced one. A role-play can include optional challenge cards for learners who want to extend the interaction. A writing task can offer a model and a vocabulary bank without making those supports mandatory. In this way, inclusion becomes less about separating learners and more about widening access to participation.

Relevance, professional identity, and the adult learner

Perhaps the most significant adaptation I make to published resources is not methodological but thematic. I adapt for relevance. In my course notes, I remarked that many online lesson plans do not connect to my learners’ lives and that coursebooks often need to be reshaped for working adults in corporate positions. This is one of the clearest lessons I have learned from teaching adults: relevance is not decorative; it is motivational infrastructure (Acuña Solano, 2026).

Dörnyei (2001) has shown that learner motivation in language classrooms is strongly influenced by task value, learner self-concept, and the perceived usefulness of classroom activities. Adult learners are especially sensitive to this. They may politely complete a task about fictional teenagers or leisure activities they have long outgrown, but their energy changes when the topic touches performance reviews, difficult clients, hybrid work, intercultural misunderstandings, or career aspirations. In those moments, language stops being a school subject and becomes a tool for self-expression and professional action (Acuña Solano, 2026).

This is why I often replace textbook speaking tasks with sketchpads built around corporate dilemmas, workplace tensions, ethical decisions, or communication breakdowns. These scenarios allow learners to draw on lived experience while practicing target language in a way that feels purposeful (Acuña Solano, 2026). They also allow me to co-create meaning with students. Their examples, frustrations, and insights enrich the lesson in ways that no generic worksheet can. In this sense, adapting materials for adults is not only about teacher intervention; it is also about recognizing learners as contributors to the lesson. The British Council course itself clearly emphasizes the value of learner contributions and the importance of adapting materials to local realities (British Council, 2026). For adult learners, this often means making room for their professional narratives, not merely asking them to perform language in artificial situations.

Adaptation as reflective professionalism

What emerges from all of this is that adaptation is not a technical afterthought but a form of reflective professionalism (Acuña Solano, 2026). It requires the teacher to read the lesson plan, read the learners, and read the teaching environment simultaneously. It also requires humility. Not every adaptation works. Some tasks still need more refining after they are taught. Some attempts at relevance become too specific; others remain too generic. Some differentiated tasks create choice but not enough challenge. Some digital simplifications go too far and reduce interaction. Adaptation, then, is not a one-time intervention but an ongoing cycle of planning, testing, observing, and revising.

For this reason, I increasingly see adaptation as something that can benefit from collaboration. Teachers do not always have to work alone. In institutions where colleagues teach similar learner profiles, teachers can share the workload by exchanging adapted speaking prompts, comparing what worked in online discussions, or building a shared bank of workplace scenarios and differentiated tasks. The British Council course mentions the value of collaboration and even encourages teachers to co-create lesson plans. In adult ELT, this collaborative spirit could be particularly valuable, since so many of us spend time reinventing materials to make them suitable for professional learners. A shared repository of adaptable adult-focused tasks, categorized by language aim, workplace function, CEFR level, and modality, would save time and reduce isolation.

Conclusion

The British Council’s How to Adapt Resources course offers a useful framework for thinking about lesson plan adaptation, but its greatest value lies not in the literal examples it provides; it lies in the mindset it encourages. It asks teachers to stop treating published materials as fixed scripts and instead approach them as flexible resources that must be interpreted through context. For teachers of young adults and working adults online, this mindset is indispensable. Our learners do not simply need lessons that are grammatically sound or visually attractive. They need lessons that acknowledge their schedules, their goals, their professional identities, their mixed proficiency profiles, and the digital conditions under which they learn.

My own reflections throughout the course confirm that adaptation is not peripheral to my teaching; it is at the heart of it. Because I work in online university and corporate contexts, I rarely use online lesson plans exactly as they are. I search selectively, adapt relentlessly, and often build speaking tasks from scratch so that learners can engage with situations that resemble their own lives. I use differentiation through choice, simplify digital delivery when necessary, and treat relevance as a central criterion rather than a luxury. In doing so, I have come to see adaptation not as evidence that published materials are inadequate, but as evidence that teaching is interpretive work (Acuña Solano, 2026). Materials can open doors, but teachers must decide which ones are worth entering, which ones must be rebuilt, and which ones must be left behind.

Ultimately, adapting resources for adult online learners is an ethical as well as pedagogical commitment. It means refusing to ask learners to inhabit a classroom world that ignores who they are. It means shaping lessons that are not merely usable, but meaningful. And it means recognizing that in language teaching, context is not a background variable. It is the very place where learning either becomes possible or remains theoretical.  

San José, Costa Rica

Friday, July 17, 2026

📚 References

Acuña Solano, J. (2026). Personal reflections and notes on Module 2, Unit 2 of the British Council course “TeachingEnglish: How to adapt resources” [Unpublished course notes].

British Council. (2025). How to adapt resources for your learners [PDF]. TeachingEnglish. https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/sites/teacheng/files/2025-06/LG_I%20%282025%29_How%20to%20adapt%20resources%20for%20your%20learners_FINAL2.pdf

British Council. (n.d.). TeachingEnglish: How to adapt resources. TeachingEnglish. https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/training/courses/teachingenglish-how-adapt-resources

Dörnyei, Z. (2001). Motivational strategies in the language classroom. Cambridge University Press.

Knowles, M. S. (1984). The adult learner: A neglected species (3rd ed.). Gulf Publishing.

Ross, C. (n.d.). Selecting and adapting learning resources for teachers: Ensuring relevance to context. TeachingEnglish, British Council. https://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/professional-development/teacher-educators/planning-learning/selecting-and-adapting-learning

Tomlinson, B. (2013). Developing materials for language teaching (2nd ed.). Bloomsbury.

Tomlinson, C. A. (2014). The differentiated classroom: Responding to the needs of all learners (2nd ed.). ASCD.

ELT Material Adaptation Strategies and Contexts

ELT Material Adaptation Strategies and Contexts by Jonathan Acuña

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