Night Train to Lisbon - Pascal Mercier

 🎙️ Radio Narration: Night Train to Lisbon

"Given that we can live only a small part of what there is in us—what happens with the rest?"

Tonight, we board the Night Train to Lisbon—not simply a train across countries, but a journey through memory, identity, and the unspoken depths of a human life.

The author behind this literary voyage is Pascal Mercier, the pen name of Peter Bieri, a Swiss writer and philosopher born in Bern in 1944. Before turning to fiction, Bieri made his name as a professor of philosophy, writing on the nature of mind, freedom, and human consciousness. When he turned to literature, he brought with him this philosophical lens—layering his stories with reflections that linger long after the last page.

Published in 2004, Night Train to Lisbon became an international sensation, translated into over a dozen languages, and praised for its quiet intensity. Critics have called it “a philosophical feast” and “a hymn to curiosity and the unexamined life.” It is a book that doesn’t merely tell a story—it invites you to pause, to think, to wonder about the roads not taken.

The story follows Raimund Gregorius, a reserved Latin teacher in Switzerland. One ordinary day, he stumbles upon a book of Portuguese writings by the mysterious Amadeu de Prado. Struck by its depth and beauty, Gregorius does something extraordinary: he walks away from his classes, his routines, his entire familiar life—and boards the night train to Lisbon.

As he uncovers Prado’s story, Gregorius is drawn into a tapestry of love, resistance, and philosophical searching. Along the way, he begins to question the shape of his own existence: “Is it possible,” Prado once wrote, “to be a stranger to oneself?”

The novel unfolds on two levels: the outer journey through Lisbon, its streets steeped in history, and the inner journey of the self—into memory, choice, and the countless lives we never live.

Readers often speak of the book’s atmosphere: the way it slows you down, the way it whispers instead of shouts, the way it opens quiet doors in the mind. For anyone who has ever wondered about paths left unexplored, or the secret lives of others, Night Train to Lisbon offers a haunting, meditative ride.

So tonight, as the train winds its way toward Portugal, it carries with it not just passengers—but questions, memories, and the unspoken dreams of a life still unfolding.

First Reading (Part 2)

The day that ended with everything different in the life of Raimund

Gregorius began like countless other days. At quarter to eight, he came

from Bundesterrasse and stepped on to the Kirchenfeldbrücke leading from

the heart of the city to the Gymnasium. He did that every day of the school

term, always at quarter to eight. Once when the bridge was blocked, he

made a mistake in the Greek class. That had never happened before nor did

it ever happen again. For days, the whole school talked of nothing but this

mistake. The longer the debate lasted, the more it was thought that he had

been misheard. At last, this conviction won out even among the students

who had been there. It was simply inconceivable that Mundus, as everyone

called him, could make a mistake in Greek, Latin or Hebrew.

Gregorius looked ahead at the pointed towers of the Historical

Museum of the city of Bern, up to the Gurten and down to the Aare with its

glacier-green water. A gusty wind drove low-lying clouds over him, turned

his umbrella inside out and whipped the rain in his face. It was then that he

noticed the woman standing in the middle of the bridge. She had leaned her

elbows on the railing and was reading – in the pouring rain – what looked

like a letter. She must have been holding the sheet with both hands. As

Gregorius came closer, she suddenly crumpled the paper, kneaded it into a

ball and threw the ball into space with a violent movement. Instinctively,

Gregorius had walked faster and was now only a few steps away from her.

He saw the rage in her pale, rain-wet face. It wasn’t a rage that could be

expressed in words and then blow over. It was a grim rage turned inward

that must have been smouldering in her for a long time. Now the woman

leaned on the railing with outstretched arms, and slipped her heels out of

her shoes. Now she jumps. Gregorius abandoned the umbrella to a gust of

wind that drove it over the railing, threw his briefcase full of school

notebooks to the ground and uttered a string of curses that weren’t part of

his usual vocabulary. The briefcase opened and the notebooks slid on to the

wet pavement. The woman turned around. For a few moments, she watched

unmoving as the notebooks darkened with the water. Then she pulled a felt￾tipped pen from her coat pocket, took two steps, leaned down to Gregorius

and wrote a line of numbers on his forehead.

‘Forgive me,’ she said in French, breathless and with a foreign accent.

‘But I mustn’t forget this phone number and I don’t have any paper with

me.’

Now she looked at her hands as if she were seeing them for the first

time.

‘Naturally, I could have …’ And now, looking back and forth between

Gregorius’s forehead and her hand, she wrote the numbers on the back of

the hand. ‘I … I didn’t want to keep it, I wanted to forget everything, but

when I saw the letter fall … I had to hold on to it.’