Italo Calvino

“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.” — from Invisible Cities In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo — Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear. “Invisible Cities changed the way we read and what is possible in the balance between poetry and prose . . . The book I would choose as pillow and plate, alone on a desert island.” — Jeanette Winterson

Invisible Cities

Conor Murphy

The city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in the corners of the streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls.

taylor miles hopkins

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”

Invisible Cities (Vintage Classics) (pp. 84-85). Random House. Kindle Edition. 

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.

Invisible Cities (Vintage Classics) (pp. 37-38). Random House. Kindle Edition. 

…has recognized that thing as the sign of another thing:…All the rest is silent and interchangeable; trees and stones are only what they are.

Your gaze scans the streets as if they were writ ten pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you be- lieve you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the namnes with which she defines herself and all her parts.

This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remnember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. 

Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city can begin to exist.

Invisible Cities quotes

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