I am nothing. I'll never be anything. I couldn't want to be something. Apart from that, I have in me all the dreams in the world.

This line opens “Tabacaria” (“The Tobacco Shop”), a modernist poem Fernando Pessoa published under his heteronym Álvaro de Campos. Written in the early 20th century and associated with Pessoa’s Lisbon milieu, the poem stages a speaker looking out from a room toward an ordinary street scene—most notably a tobacco shop—while spiraling into a crisis of identity, ambition, and self-worth. Campos, Pessoa’s most emotionally volatile and futurist-leaning persona, often dramatizes the clash between grand inner intensity and the banality of daily life. The poem’s famous beginning sets the tone: a confession of nullity paired with an imagination that remains inexhaustible.

The speaker declares a radical self-negation—“I am nothing… I’ll never be anything”—not simply as despair but as an existential diagnosis: social roles and achievements feel empty, and even the desire to “be something” seems compromised. Yet the final turn insists on a paradoxical abundance: inner life, fantasy, and possibility persist even when the self is stripped of status or purpose. Pessoa (through Campos) captures a distinctly modern condition in which consciousness is vast but agency feels paralyzed. The line’s power lies in holding both truths at once: the self as void in the world, and the mind as a limitless theater of dreams.