Italo Calvino - Invisible Cities

• Desires are already memories

• 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.

• ”The more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there.”

• 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.

• 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.

• This – some say – confirms the hypothesis that each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city with out figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.

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

• Perhaps Adelma is the city where you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means, I too, am dead .

• Perhaps all that is left of the worlds is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging garden of the Great Khan’s palace. It is our eyelids that separate them, that we cannot know which is inside and which is outside.

• It is not the voice that commands the story; it is the ear.

• At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away, while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unreliable 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. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to life again.

• Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels, then is stretched again between moving points as it draws new and rapid patterns so that at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence.

• Perhaps everything lies in knowing what words to speak, what actions to perform, and in what order and rhythm; or else someone’s gaze, answer, gesture is enough; it is enough for someone to do something for the sheer pleasure of doing it, and for his pleasure to become the pleasure of others: at that moment, all spaces change, all heights, distances’ the city is transfigured, becomes crystalline, transparent as a dragonfly.

• At times all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sens out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop.