Fernando Pessoa (great portuguese language poet) TOBACCO SHOP - (excerpts) I'm nothing. I'll allways be nothing. I can't even wish to be something. Aside from

Fernando Pessoa (great portuguese language poet) TOBACCO SHOP - (excerpts) I'm nothing. I'll allways be nothing. I can't even wish to be something. Aside from that, I've got all the world's dream inside me. Windows of my room, The room of just one of the millions in the world nobody knows (And what would they know, if they knew that?), You open on the mistery of a street people are constantly crossing, A street blocked off to all though, A street that's real, impossibly real, and right, unconsciously right, With the mistery of things lying under live beings and stones, With death spreading darkness on walls and white hair on heads, With fate driving the cart of everything down nothingness road. Today I'm bowled over, as though hit by the truth. Today I'm clearheaded, as though I were going to die, Having no more brotherly feeling for things Than to say good-bye, turning this house and this side of the street Into a line of coaches in a long train with its whistle shrieking good-bye From inside my head, And a nerve-wracking, bone-cracking jerk as it moves off. Today I'm mixed up, like someone who thought something and grasped it, then lost it. Today I'm torn between the allegiance I owe Something real outside me - The Tobacco Shop across the street, And something real inside me - the feeling that it's all a dream. I failed in everything. Since I was up to nothing, maybe it was all really nothing. From learning and training for anything useful I escaped By slipping off to the country with great plans, By found only grass and threes there, And when there were people, they were just like any others. I leave the window, sit down in a chair. What should I think about? [....] (Eat your chocolates, little girl! Eat your chocolates! Look, there's no metaphysics on earth but chocolates. Look, all religions on earth have nothing more to teach us than a candy store does. Eat, dirty little girl, eat them up! If I could gobble down those chocolates as trustily as you do! But I think, peeling off the silver wrapper, it's only tinfoil, And toss it in the floor, just as I've tossed away my life.) But at least, out of my bitterness at what I'll never be, There's the quick calligraphy of these lines, The broken archway to the Impossible. And at least I reserve for myself this dry-eyed contempt- Noble, at least, in the great gesture I make Flinging out the dirty clothes I am, with no laundry list, into the drift of things, And stay at home, shirtless. [....]