Invisible Cities

Excerpts from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino:

“Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.”

“It is the mood of the beholder which gives the city of Zermuda its form. If you go by whistling, your nose a-tilt behind the whistle, you will know it form below: windowsills, flapping curtains, fountains. If you walk along hanging your head, your nails dug into the palms of your hands, your gaze will be held on the ground, in the gutters, the manhole covers, the fish scales, wastepaper. You cannot say that one aspect of the city is truer than the other, but you hear the upper Zermude chiefly from those who remember it, as they wink into lower Zemrude, following every day the same stretches of street and finding again each morning the ill-humor of the day before, encrusted at the food of the walls. For everyone, sooner or later, the day comes when we bring our gaze down along the drainpipes and we can no longer detach it from the cobblestones. The reverse is not impossible, but is more rare: and so we continue walking through Zemrude’s streets with eyes now digging into the cellars, the foundations, the wells.”

(I aim to be one of those who never grows tired of looking up)

“And Polo said: “The inferno of 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 the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”