"Η κόλαση των ζωντανών δεν είναι κάτι που αφορά το μέλλον: αν υπάρχει μια κόλαση, είναι αυτή που υπάρχει ήδη εδώ, �� κόλαση που κατοικούμε καθημερινά, που διαμορφώνουμε με τη συμβίωσή μας. Δύο τρόποι υπάρχουν για να μην υποφέρουμε. Ο πρώτος είναι για πολλούς εύκολος: να αποδεχθούν την κόλαση και να γίνουν τμήμα της μέχρι να καταλήξουν να μην βλέπουν πια. Ο δεύτερος είναι επικίνδυνος και απαιτεί συνεχή προσοχή και διάθεση για μάθηση: να προσπαθήσουμε και να μάθουμε να αναγνωρίζουμε ποιος και τι, μέσα στην κόλαση, δεν είναι κόλαση, και να του δώσουμε διάρκεια, να του δώσουμε χώρο".
Last book stop of the year

Cities and Eyes

There is a world that lies atop a mound of green, where the treetops are tinged with rust and people fly by on bicycles and shoes with wheels. The saunterers wander off the criss-crossed madness of paths and cut up and down hills, across grassy plains, diving into the forested fringes.



We are on Mount Royal, the fabled dead volcano visited by schoolchildren on geography trips and tourists searching for a grander view of the city below. The air is crisp up here. Each inch of space is planned, manicured, protected, but the city folk walk about in a daze of wilderness, returning in their minds to the heart of Nature with a capital N. Men in red uniforms clop past on horses, clocking time back another hundred years. Laughter is easy on this smallest of mountains. But as the sun sets, so falls a hush, because no one lives here and all but the most resourceful must climb back down to civilization.

Taking a path eastward, down stairs and past picnic tables, breathing in the mild perfume of Mary Jane, we arrive in the heart of the Plateau, the land of balconies and colourful spiralled staircases, each avenue an architectural delight. Chairs scrape on terraces and people in gypsy pants stop to look over the potted herbs and organic produce. From afar you can hear the cries "Gentrification!" and "Ici on parle français!" but people carry on babbling in whatever language they so choose and spending, spending, spending. Here the parks are filled with strollers and a depanneur is never more than a minute away. Spirits and prices soar, and people walk with a skip in their step, humming a tune that keeps them from looking down at their erstwhile neighbours who can no longer climb the stairs to their apartment.

To meet them, we must hold our breath and sink deeper into this underground city. The sun never shines in this commercial belly of the beast. Through tunnels and past shop windows, you can walk the length of downtown without ever feeling the frosty lick of the whipping winter wind. Camped out in dank passageways are huddled shapes, facing the wall, sleeping or waking in this nightmare world. Women walk past quickly and do not recognize their old schoolmate, disfigured by a perfect storm of circumstance. The denizens of this metro station arrive early for work, Tim Hortons cups empty and at the ready, waiting for a drop from the streams of lucre rushing hurriedly past.

I look at this city with so many sets of eyes and know that for every image that I capture, there are three million more being imagined every moment. My heart lies in all these places but I cannot show them to you, because I am too busy swimming in the lake of my mind.

چه برایمان آورده ای مارکو؟؟؟

ته دلم خوش بود که قرار است سری هم به ادبیات ایتالیا بزنم...
اما شنیدن کی بود مانند خواندن!
خواستم از خودم بپرسم آخر ابله چرا وقتت را با این کتاب هدر دادی،مگر بیگانه کامو خار داشت؟
که درست چند ثانیه بعد صدایی بهم گفت:زر نزن بابا یک عمر مفت وقت هدر دادی...

در این ریویو میخواهم به این کتاب سیفون بکشم-بکشم سیفون به این کتاب،کتاب سیفون به این بکشم
٫ولش بابا انگار من نمیتوانم مانند کالوینو دیالوگ چرند بگویم،آخر شما قضاوت کنید من اگر کل عمرم را هم مطالعه کنم می‌توانم بگویم
( همه اینها را گفت تا مارکو بتواند توضیح دهد یا تصور کند که دارد توضیح میدهد)

خدایی وقتی این دیالوگ ها را میخواندید نخندیدید؟؟

حالا میخواهم برایتان قصه شهر ذونیه را بگویم!
نگو آقا جان نگو نگو .به من چه که ذونیه خوشحال است یا بد حال؟ من اصلا چه کار به کار طبیعت دارم.

کالوینو انگار مخاطب را شلغم فرض کرده که میگوید هدف من از توصیف ونیز چیز دیگریست.عزیز من،فهمیدیم منظور شما چیز دیگریست چرا داد میزنی؟؟ کتاب ملت عشق که نیست یکهو یک قاعده بر دهن مارکوی بدبخت نمایان میکنی.!

خواستی ما رو با این قصه های بچگانه سرگرم کنی دمت چیز...

ایتالو کالوینو برایم تمام شد و احساس کردم مردیست که در پارک قدم میزند و از رهگذری درخواست سیگار میکند و رهگذر هم بجای توتون خدا میداند چه چیزی آن تو ،چپانده...
شاید بگید از حق نگذر کتاب جملات خوبی هم داشت که این هم درسته چون اونی که گفت
(امروزتون مثل دیروزتون نباشه )
هم گاها حرفای قشنگی زده...

One of my favourite books, read and re-read many times.

****

Joseph Mcelroy's review from the New York Times, 1974 (transcription errors obviously mine - tried to do what I could):

"Invisible Cities" is a new book by Italy's most original storyteller, Italo Calvino. But this time not a book of stories. Something more.
In "Cosmicomics" Calvino found a way to make fables out of evolution. The fables emerged like elemental anecdotes from opening hypotheses, and the biology, the physics, the astronomy, were much more knowledgeable than Calvino the entertainer let them seem. But in "t zero" (which in my opinion was one of the most important works of fiction published during the sixties), Calvino accepted his scientific subject matter less whimsically. He deepened and complicated his vision
and voices. He moved into mathematics. He imagined what it might feel like when a one-celled self divides.
In his earlier historical romances that theme of growth had been seen through a kind of uncertain satirical fancy. A young baron takes to the trees in protest against society, and stays there to become an arboreal amphibian, a rebel mutant. A young viscount goes away to war only to be blown apart; his nasty half returns home like some subversion of himself but at long last is rejoined to his long lost good half.
Recently, in "Smog" and in two of the "t zero" stories, Calvino has turned the precise play of his mind upon separations and isolations in urban life. And now, in "Invisible Cities," he has transmuted his themes into something new.
The wonderful phenomena of "Invisible Cities" are seen as through some unfolding nuclear kaleidoscope. Past and future possibility grow out of the prison of an "unlivable present, where all forms of human society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what new
forms they may assume."
These words-in William Weaver's beautifully seductive translation-are spoken by an imaginary Kublai Khan, old and pessimistic, for one of the book's two interleaved narratives is his curious, elegiac conversation with his employee, the Venetian traveller Marco Polo. The second narrative-which fills the book's main spaces and makes it not so much a parody of the 13th-century "Travels" as an alternative meditation-is what Marco brings the Khan: an account of fifty-odd cities Marco has visited. Thin cities, double cities, cities suspended-cities, despite Calvino's title, exactly and fascinatingly visible-cities such as Hypatia, in whose lagoons crabs bite the eyes of suicides; or Thekla, where new building never stops lest destruction begin: or three-fold Beersheba projecting celestial jewel-like self above, and base city of cheese rinds and fish scales below, but officially ignoring its "only free and happy action," defecating.
Why does the emperor ask the traveler to tell him what is in his empire? Partly because the emperor cannot know what is in it. Perhaps because he may wish not to know, but also because he must wish to feel in its deterioration some chance of growth.
Calvino's twin narratives lean toward and away from each other. The cities, for all their distilled form, represent Mass. The intermittent conversation between the Khan and Marco Polo is Form; it is the will to simplify; it is also a dialogue between the imperial will to impose and possess and the power to rest in the contemplation of multiplicity. At first, the Khan finds in Marco's accounts "a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing." Then, as the two men talk, cities come to seem "consolatory fables," states of mind, phantasms.
Yet in the main narrative these cities have the glint of substance; they are alluring, disturbing and distinct as if possessed of the significance of a Kafka parable.
On the other hand, though each city has its special quality, Calvino's gazetteer is elusive, for it embraces perverse paradoxes and sequences within sequences. We are warned not to confuse cities with the words used to describe them; yet we are told that falsehood is not in words but in things. Cities of Signs touch Cities of Memory.
The voluptuous Trading City Chloe, where strangers (like figures out of RobbeGrillet's "La Maison des Rendezvous") consummate strange intimacies in silence, may remind us of that Hid en City of sadness, Raissa, "where runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another ... unravels ... draws new patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence."
Calvino's elusiveness comes also from the honesty with which he develops his series. "Invisible Cities" is an elegy, autumnal and melancholy. Cities do move more and more toward failure, and toward the end of the book Procopia, the last of the "Continuous Cities," is so crowded that the people hide the place and even the sky.
And there is Penthesilea, less an "aggregation of opaque polyhedrons on the horizon" than a limbo of endless outskirts. But the reader finds something more interesting here than decline and fall. Even the cities that exhibit delusion and degeneration remain the possibilities from which, as Marco tells the Khan, any crystal-perfect community whose molecular form the Khan dreams of must in part be calculated.
In Laudamia death seems a function of ignorance, yet they are subtly balanced by the strict and close attention Calvino's lens draws from us. If Perinthia, like some old rational Utopia designed to reflect the pattern of the heavens, is, doomed, Calvino has yet more complex appreciations of order to offer us. In Andria, whose layout and calendar reflect the firmament, alterations nonetheless occur all the time and "any, change in Andria involves some novelty in the stars." And since "every innovation in the city influences the sky's pattern," the Andrians must think of the consequences "for all worlds." And then at last we reach what seems almost to be the secret center of Calvino's vision: Berenice, where the just city grows within the unjust city but will itself become unjust in its time as surely as it its [illegible]
Still, Babylon and Yahooland will not go away. And the Khan's great atlas unveils shapeless networks of the future-Los Angeles, Kyoto-Osaka. Yet then I remember those closing stories of "t zero" in which the mind makes new space within patterns of imprisonment, and does so in speculations that accept analysis and technology not simply as the enemy but as models and targets of intense and vital attention. For I believe it is some such space that Calvino has created for his archetypal communities.
If they are forms, they are also like signals condensing in themselves power that awaits its translation into form. And Calvino's book is like no other I know.

Marco Polo relata sus viajes a Kublai Kan, emperador de los tártaros, le describe ciudades imposibles, inventadas por Calvino o tal vez imaginadas por Polo o soñadas por los habitantes de las ciudades que Polo describe. El emperador no le cree todo pero escucha con atención.

Son capítulos breves que describen cada uno una ciudad con nombre de mujer y se pueden leer por separado. Los leí de a poco para disfrutar su prosa y porque disparan muchas imágenes y dejan pensando. Estos capítulos están engarzados por el diálogo entre Polo y Kublai Kan.

n  Vuelves de comarcas tan lejanas y todo lo que sabes decirme son los pensamientos que se le ocurren al que toma el fresco por la noche sentado en el umbral de su casa. ¿De qué te sirve, entonces, viajar tanto? n

Hay ciudades tristes, felices, infelices, concéntricas, alguna que es reflejo del cosmos, alguna que es una auténtica pesadilla. Pero todas son ciudades que solo pueden existir en el lenguaje y no sin dificultades, con mucha magia, que es lo que hace Calvino en este libro.

n  …es cierto que las palabras servían mejor que los objetos y los gestos para catalogar las cosas más importantes de cada provincia y ciudad: monumentos, mercados, trajes, fauna y flora; sin embargo, cuando Polo empezaba a decir cómo debía ser la vida en aquellos lugares, día por día, noche tras noche, le faltaban las palabras, y poco a poco volvía a recurrir a gestos, a muecas, a miradas. n

Todas estas ciudades se desvanecieron cuando terminé el libro, tendré que volver a leerlo una y otra vez.

Ένα βιβλίο που κουβαλάω μέσα μου 25 χρόνια, μισοδιαβασμένο, μπλεγμένο με όνειρα και αβεβαιότητες, συνυφασμένο σε κάποια σημεία του με τις cités obscures του Schuiten.
Κάπου μέσα στις τόσες μετακομίσεις η κόπια από τις εκδόσεις Οδυσσέας σε μετάφραση της Καπογιαννοπούλου χάθηκε. Έψαξα παντού αλλά το βιβλίο παραμένει "αόρατο"! Σκέφτηκα πως ίσως το χάρισα, πράγμα που είναι η ιδανική ερμηνεία της απώλειας, και έτσι το αγόρασα ξανά σε άλλη μετάφραση.
Οι αόρατες πολιτείες για μένα παραμένουν ένα αίνιγμα. Στον Calvino η σημειολογία λειτουργεί αντίστροφα: αντί να ερμηνεύει τα σημεία, τα καμουφλάρει δημιουργώντας κοχλίες νοημάτων, περίτεχνα πασπαρτού: κάποιες φορές αποκωδικοποιώ το μήνυμα αλλά πιο συχνά μένω να θαυμάζω την ομορφιά και να ακολουθώ τους συσχετισμούς χωρίς κανόνα, ελεύθερα. Άραγε είναι τυχαίο που όλες οι αόρατες πολιτείες έχουν γυναικείο όνομα;
Είναι το μαγικό βιβλίο που δεν νιώθεις ποτέ ότι τελειώνει. Η ανάγνωση μου 25 χρόνια μετά ήταν ίσως πιο μεστή σε ερμηνείες αλλά λίγο πιο στεγνή σε ονειροπλασίες. Ίσως πρέπει να ξαναβρώ την παλιά κόπια. Ίσως πάλι πρέπει να βρω το μονοπάτι προς την πολιτεία της νιότης !

In writing, pretension is the act of pulling your hamstring while lifting your pen. It is that sudden, clear, and unfortunate. It should also be avoidable, but anyone gifted with a grain of brilliance is tempted to extend it as far as they can, like Donne's speck of dust stretched the length of the universe, one is left wondering whether it was more ludicrous or thought-provoking.

Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' is a series of descriptions of mythical, impossible cities told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. Each short description is like one of Donne's metaphysical poems: presenting a philosophical argument or idea and then turning it on its head. As an Italian, Calvino drew his inspiration from the same source as Donne: Francesco Petrarch.

Petrarch is the innovator of the modern sonnet, the modern love poem, and 'confessional' poetry. However, before you all wish him dead(er), his 'love' and 'confessions' were only the cover for his philosophical explorations. Like Sidney, Shakespeare, Wyatt, and the Victorian poets (Keats, Browning, Byron), the surface of the poem is not the whole story.

Also like Petrarch, Calvino's short pieces all work together to create a grander story, using repetition and developing symbols to create webs of meaning from one story to any other. Both Petrarch and Calvino take a narrow view for their collections, one Love and the other Cities, but Petrarch does more with his.

Calvino's repetition is sometimes interesting and meaningful, but often, it seems like he's still trying to hash out his ideas. Some of the cities are remarkable and poignant, but others somewhat scattered and redundant.

The frame story of Polo and Kublai also vacillates in profundity. At it's best, it questions the nature of human relationships, interaction, understanding, and language barriers. At other times it descends into New Age metaphysics and solipsism: endlessly wondrous, endlessly pointless, and perfect for capturing the imagination of the first-year philosophy major.

These moments of overextension are balanced by some truly thought-provoking and delightful observations and questions about the nature of the world and the senses. The book is truly dreamlike, in that one dream may alter the way you look at life, while the next one will be about bass fishing with Julie Newmar in your underwear; fun perhaps, but not lasting.

Calvino has a great talent, and a remarkable mind, but it's clear that he was bent on transgressing and ignoring boundaries, and hence often crosses the limits of his own skill. This uninhibited exploration is truly something every author and artists should aspire to, but the false leaps should be left behind in editing.

As redundancy and vagueness builds up, we can see the areas of difficulty and obsession for Calvino, for these always end with a shrug instead of the final thrust that carries us over his more salient points. While in these cases he might have made the journey itself the important part, he tends to concentrate on the ends, even when he proves incapable of reaching them.

Walking the same roads again and again looking for something and failing to find it is not the mark of the fantastical fabulist, but of the minute realist. Calvino's story is never small and personal, even when detailed and nostalgic, it is hyperbolic and magical.

When he dances around some vague point, he is not Ariosto, presenting the limits of mankind: Calvino gives us his own limits. The descriptions are far-flung and often set the mind reeling with humor or more poignant observation. That he sometimes overextends himself is not such a crime, when occasionally, he does reach those heights.

It's true to say that this book is not any one thing, that it defies description and draws from many sources and traditions, but neither do these varying and disparate influences coalesce into some wholly new vision. The closer he comes to any climax or conclusion, the more he grows uncertain.

I'm not suggesting that such a climax is necessary--indeed, in a loosely-structured work like this, where the most effective aspect is the comparison and contradiction between each individual piece, shoehorning in such a convenient conclusion wouldn't really work--neither Petrarch nor Borges needed one. In their great collections, one could start almost anywhere, and end almost anywhere, without having lost the thread of their thoughts.

What frustrates about Calvino is that he's constantly pushing towards conclusion, and harping on it despite the fact that such a conclusion is not even necessary--indeed, a work like this achieves its effect by the questions it asks, not the answers that it tries to give. So, Calvino ends up giving us numerous empty answers when simple silence would have been far more provocative.

Is it ever really meaningful to end by stating 'maybe it is this way, maybe it is that way, maybe nothing exists at all'? What do we gain by saying this that we would not have by simply leaving it unsaid? The author who imagines stating that his own ignorance is profound is simply exercising the vanity of false humility.

Better to let the observations and moments of wit speak for themselves. If the reader is not reminded of his own short-sightedness by these, then telling him he is short-sighted certainly won't help.

I must say that these moments of falling flat could have been a subtlety of William Weaver's translation, but since such an issue is beyond my meager means to fully explore, I felt it better to tender my review to the book I read, rather than to the book that might exist out there, somewhere.

I live in a city, and every day I ride the subway with people who live in different cities. Aggressively loud teenagers, exhausted laborers with grimy hands, sparkling skinny women in careful clothes, Michael Cera: I don't think they would recognize my city.

But we find our city, and our city finds us, right? The Flamethrowers' artist Reno moves to a New York full of artists madly creating. Patrick Bateman is fake, and he lives in a fake New York. The Street's Lutie lives in a cruel New York, and she becomes cruel. The city invents us, and we invent the city.

I play a game when I travel to other cities: what makes this city special? In Barcelona you think of Gaudi, but that's like identifying a guy by his hat. It can be useful, don't get me wrong, and he's wearing that hat for a reason, but underneath he is mostly the same organs. Is he nice?

As a tourist, I see a lot of hats.

Some cities are legitimately different. Worcester, Mass is legitimately shitty. Las Vegas really is your dangerously bipolar cousin.

Cities are uniquely mutable, because they have to be. It takes all kinds of people to make a city, so it has to suit all kinds of people. When you ask someone to describe their city, you're asking them how they see the world, and how the world sees them. I saw a dude throw a chicken bone on the subway floor the other day: his world has been ugly to him, full of negative interactions and ugly things. It's all trash. (I didn't actually ask, I just projected a bunch of shit on him.)

My New York is a utopia. Everyone has a weird hobby and a rescued pit bull, and there are wine tastings on every corner. I'm lucky.

I've been reading Invisible Cities on the subway, a chapter each way, looking around me and thinking, "Do I see anyone who lives in this city? The city of threads? The city of mirrors?" I imagine they're looking back and thinking, "If that bald guy keeps staring at me I'm going to punch him." My dog rides the subway with me. I can't imagine what city he lives in.

What's your city like? Seriously, I'm interested.

n  Heidi Whitman - Brain Terrain.n

I have not read Marco Polos’s Journeys, but I could imagine what he has written. Had I read it, I also would have had to imagine what he had written. Same verbs, different tenses.

As I am sitting on a bench in front of a museum, waiting for a friend, a family of Italian tourists comes and sits next to me. They come from the land of Marco Polo, or maybe not, may be from the land of Italo Calvino since I do not know if they are Venetians. Italy was a projection of the Imagination in the nineteenth century. Marco Polo did not know it.

They carry a guidebook of the city of Madrid, and are trying to make sense out of the book, a book written in their language, and also make sense out of the city, written in the language of cities. Universally understood. Cosmopolitan.

It must be the monuments, the streets, the histories, the nourishment, the inhabitants, the parks, the related but different language that they want to understand. They use the text and the reproduced images as the key to comprehend the Urbis and the originals standing in front of them.


Memory

And may be one of them, the father, remembers when he came here with his parents. He could be telling his children now about his Memories. But as they are listening, they are also discarding those Memories and forming their own: new future Memories of having visited the city with their parents. And they will tell their future children who will also forget. Remembering a Forgetting, like waves of the same sea.


Desire

Their visit must have been prompted by some Desire to leave their everyday monotonous but comfortable life and look for excitement. Depending on their age they could participate in the bustling Madrid night life in which Desires wildly run. Age and Desire. Are all of them captives of their Desire-Spectrums?

Would I desire to unlock their Desires?

No. Only mine.


Signs

Looking around these Italians could observe that most Signs only signal the same as all the others. International sign language has become a non-sign language. They mean sameness.


Thin Cities

As Europeans they should not be surprised to see that this is not a Thin City. There are trees, there are street lamps, and there are some dreadful tall buildings. It is a city that could grow horizontally because it is on a barren plateau. And yet,… and yet, it has steep roads. And these do feel like pure verticals on a tired morning. The city is hilly and the sharp drop comes as a surprise as one arrives at the Palacio Real, where the Sabatini Gardens extend deep down. Francisco Sabatini, another Italian and architect and who has projected an invisible Italian quality to this city. As if Marco Polo had been here.


Trading Cities

With no seaport it had to become a port of projections and become a matrix for the dispatches to far-away ports. And it did so contrary to Marco Polo’s direction when his route was blocked by the Tartars. This landlocked city would determine the launching of the black Galleons and sail them off cruising the sea-routes to meet the successors of Kublai Kahn and Trade with them in that twin trading city, Ma-Nila-Ma-Drid. Coming and going.


Eyes

There is a building where there are many Eyes. They are all moving and roving around, looking at the walls, at the colours and flat shapes on the walls. And they continue looking and those walls with their images look back at them. The paintings have been looking at eyes for a longer time than these eyes have looked at anything.

And there thrones a picture with which the imagination of a Venetian captured the Warrior on horseback looking over those eyes, looking without seeing them.

Echoing the other Emperor when he had said to his Venetian: “describe to me your cities”, Emperor Charles V summoned Tiziano Vecellio and said to him “paint me your worlds, so that I can see them”.

Tiziano painted Charles’ gaze into the horizon, into his world.


Names

Matrix, or Matrice or Matriz or Magerit or Magra.

The same city, different identities and varying names.

Madrid in Spanish, Madrid in English, Madrid in German.

And 马德里 in Mandarin, Ma-de-li, for the understanding of Kublai Kahn.


The Dead

The monuments make the Dead more alive that the current alive. They remain and there are very many. But since I have a Now, I am interested in the fewer ones.


The Sky

It is not true that Madrid has no sea. It just hangs over its inhabitants. The very intense blue of the Sky, so deep an azure because of the dry climate and the elevation of the city, makes one imagine oneself with wings which can be spread out to then set off with one’s soul and swim in the airy ocean.

The Ultra-Mar.


Continuous

Night and day, and Seasons. And clocks, many clocks. They seem to divide time, but they are phantasmagorias or devices that do the opposite from the magic emerging out of Phenakistoscopes and create the illusion of discrete, detached, distinct moments out of the unceasing Continuous.


Hidden

Most of the inhabitants are also tourists, like this Italian family. This is a city populated not just by passers in Life, but principally by outsiders who were not born here. Anonymous origins and undisclosed length of time for their open transit. Whether in hotels or temporary homes everybody’s lives remain invisible from each other. And their realities are not deciphered in the guide book of the Italians, just as Marco Polo did not succeed in deciphering his cities for the Great Kahn. They will remain invisible.


Great Chan

Invisible Cities forms part of the conclusion of Jonathan’s Spence’s
The Chan's Great Continent: China in Western Minds. After reviewing the representation of China in Western minds, starting with Marco Polo, Spence tackles in the final chapter the three geniuses who understood what was at stake. Neither Kafka, nor Borges nor Calvino, had ever been to China. Yet, to the Sinologist Spence, they were the three bright minds who did not fall on the Orientalist trappings. And Calvino was the one to have identified best the trappings of the mind in representing the fascinating unknown.

“In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Kubla Khan
There are a countless number of cities but the most mysterious are those that we build in our imagination.
Marco Polo arrives and he tells Kublai Khan about ghostly cities he visited during his journeys…

n  Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.n

Cities are filled with memories: pleasant and sad… Cities are full of signs: explicit and obscure… Cities are laden with moods: exultant and nostalgic… Cities are packed with goods: necessary and trashy… Cities are fraught with the dead past and they brim with the alive present…

n  “With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.”n

Whatever we seek, wherever we search, we’re just looking for our true inner self.

Timing is everything. Had I read this book at the time of my obsession with postmodernism, I would have been enthralled. I would have spent hours and days identifying painstakingly all the connections between various cities, their meanings and symbols. Calvino would have become one of my favorite authors, I would have sought out everything he had written.

As it was, another -ism that captivated me for a while eventually lost its allure. When the book finally reached me - the sparkling imagination, the fabulous execution, the magical packaging left me cold. And while some cities, some reflections on human behavior were amusing they did not really touch me until I noticed the ever intensifying change of the tone from light and playful, to absurd, and then to predominantly dark.

It is in this gloom where the author of Invisible Cities takes you before delivering his most quoted phrase, a nugget of gold you can't miss as it is no longer invisible:
“The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

I wish this book was invisible.