Regarding Italo Calvino's
"Invisible Cities"
Was Mer the one from whom i heard of this book? Certainly her voice was one of them - she spoke of Fedora, the city of crystal globes.
P35
QuoteNo one remembers what need or command drove Zenobia's founders to give their city this form, and so there is no telling whether it was satisfied by the city as we see it today, . . . But what is certain is that if you ask an inhabitant of Zenobia to describe his vision of a happy life, it is always a city like Zenobia that he imagines. . . it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it.
Alive and dead, so to speak.
Invisible Cities is giving me a strong feeling of lonely distance—I suppose what the emperor is feeling or what I would feel in his shoes.
When i say that i do not think the book is beautiful, i mean it leaves me with a terrible nameless ennui—a bad feeling. An ugly feeling.
The connection that i feel to this book is deeply true, but it is not inspiring, does not make me feel good, does not propel me, does not give me spirit...
It retraces old and bad thoughts.
The craft is impeccable and I do not reject these emotions within myself, but i do not need... I do not see a reason to pursue a work which stirs up such emotion right now?
That said, it is a complete work. I've started it, is exploring Something Uncomfortable, and if i don't finish it then perhaps I will never see the entirety of Calvino's great work.
Earlier today I felt somewhat directionless, purposeless. This is what a weekend is for, is it not?
I'm reading Invisible Cities in another way now, not as an emperor but as a traveller. It's better now.
P44
Quote. . . a connecting thread, an inner rule, a perspective, a discourse. With cities, as it is with dreams: . . . You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives you to a question of yours.
P82
QuoteMarco Polo describes a bridge stone by stone. . . . "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." . . . "Without stokes there is no arch."
Here I am complaining, as the emperor does, of stones.
these cities and these characters
are disintegrating before my eyes
like memories, dreams, and stories;
like memories, dreams, and stories,
the harder i look the more they fall
apart into interpretation, into fiction,
into myth.
P105
P163
Quote. . . all the future Berenices [the unjust city, within which is the hidden Berenice, the city of the just, which contains a malignant seed hidden in its turn, which...] are already present in this instant, wrapped one within the other, confined, crammed, inextricable.
P165
". . . seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space."