"Invisible Cities"

[fiefoe]

Italo Calvino (translated by William Weaver) is a great delight to read, and reminds one (of course) of Borges. (But perhaps he's even more neurologically wise.) Also, this book should be counted among the best books to read in bits and pieces.

• It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin,.. that the triumph over enemy sovereigns had made us the heirs of their long undoing.
• The special quality of this city (Diomira).. is that he feels envy toward those who now believe they had once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.
• The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age... Desires are already memories.
• The city.. consists of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past: the height of a lamppost and the distance from the ground of a hanged usurper's swaying feet;   <> The city (Zaira), 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...
• While you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.
• In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant...
• Zora's secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. <> This city.. is like a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember. <>  Forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.
• Memory is redundant: it repeats signs so that the city (Zirma) can begin to exist.
• the ingenious foreigner improvised pantomimes: one city was depicted by the leap of a fish escaping the cormorant's beak to fall into a net;...
• The empire is nothing but a zodiac of the mind's phantasms.  / the carousel of fantasies
• All this so that Marco Polo could explain or imagine explaining or be imagined explaining or succeed finally in explaining to himself that what he sought was always something lying ahead... the traveler's past changes according to the route he has followed.. the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places.
• Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.
• (Maurilia) has the added attraction that, through what it has become, once can look back with nostalgia at what it was.
• Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and at every equinox.
• a glass tank high as a cathedral so people can follow the swimming and flying of the swallow fish and draw auguries from them;
• 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.
• Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive offering to win the favor of the nymphs,
• This is the foundation of the city (Octavia): a net which serves as passage and as support. All the rest, instead of rising up, is hung below.
• "Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased," Polo said. "Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it."
• "You reach a moment in life when... 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."
• the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement(Eusapia) work.. performed with more contentment than irritation: a girl with a laughing skull milks the carcass of a heiferthe scales of (Leonia')s past are soldered into a cuirass that cannot be removed.
• The Laudomia of the dead and that of the unborn are like the two bulbs of an hourglass which is not turned over; each passage between birth and death is a grain of sand that passes the neck.
• All the inhabitants of Marozia will fly like swallows in the summer sky, calling one another as in a game, showing off, their wings still, as they swoop, clearing the air of mosquitoes and gnats.