THE TOBACCO SHOP
By:
September 2, 2025
A series dedicated to poems, published c. 1900–1935, the Radium Age sf-adjacent themes of which include: dystopia and utopia, far-out mathematics and the fourth dimension, Afro-futurism, catastrophe, future war, new technologies, scientific breakthrough, dehumanization, cosmic awe, disenchantment and unseen forces, unknowable aliens and singularity. Research and selection by Joshua Glenn; thematic index here.
Musical essence of my useless verses,
If only I could look at you as something I
had made
Instead of always looking at the Tobacco
Shop across the street,
Trampling on my consciousness of existing,
Like a rug a drunkard stumbles on
Or a doormat stolen by gypsies and it’s not
worth a thing.
But the Tobacco Shop Owner has come to
the door and is standing there.
I look at him with the discomfort of a
half-twisted neck
Compounded by the discomfort of a
half-grasping soul.
He will die and I will die.
He’ll leave his signboard, I’ll leave my
poems.
His sign will also eventually die, and so will
my poems.
Eventually the street where the sign was
will die,
And so will the language in which my
poems were written.
Then the whirling planet where all of this
happened will die.
On other planets of other solar systems
something like people
Will continue to make things like poems
and to live under things like signs,
Always one thing facing the other,
Always one thing as useless as the other,
Always the impossible as stupid as reality,
Always the inner mystery as true as the
mystery sleeping on the surface.
Always this thing or always that, or neither
one thing nor the other.
But a man has entered the Tobacco Shop
(to buy tobacco?),
And plausible reality suddenly hits me.
I half rise from my chair — energetic,
convinced, human —
And will try to write these verses in which I
say the opposite.
I light up a cigarette as I think about writing
them,
And in that cigarette I savor a freedom
from all thought.
My eyes follow the smoke as if it were my
own trail
And I enjoy, for a sensitive and fitting
moment,
A liberation from all speculation
And an awareness that metaphysics is a
consequence of not feeling very well.
Then I lean back in the chair
And keep smoking.
As long as Destiny permits, I’ll keep
smoking.
— Excerpt from a longer poem of this title. Dated January 15, 1928.
Considered one of Pessoa’s signature poems.
RADIUM AGE PROTO-SF POETRY: Stephen Spender’s THE PYLONS | George Sterling’s THE TESTIMONY OF THE SUNS | Archibald MacLeish’s EINSTEIN | Thomas Thornely’s THE ATOM | C.S. Lewis’s DYMER | Stephen Vincent Benét’s METROPOLITAN NIGHTMARE | Robert Frost’s FIRE AND ICE | Aldous Huxley’s FIFTH PHILOSOPHER’S SONG | Sara Teasdale’s “THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS” | Edith Södergran’s ON FOOT I HAD TO… | Robert Graves’s WELSH INCIDENT | Nancy Cunard’s ZEPPELINS | D.H. Lawrence’s WELLSIAN FUTURES | & many more.