I knew about this book because I watched a documentary, One Book, One City. The second part of the documentary opens with Rome and is accompanied by this book. The title of the book is full of fantasy, beautiful and absurd description, so I thought at first it was a story in a fantasy kingdom. It was only when I actually read on that I was surprised to find a gorgeous treasure trove.
The whole book is basically Marco Polo's report on Kublai. It feels like Marco Polo is spreading out a map and telling Kublai about all the different cities he has visited. The names of these cities are extremely beautiful: Aeschylia, Porcius, Leandra, Odile, Lyssa, Algy, Moriana ...... If you list all the names of the cities he mentions, it is as if the temperament of the beauty of the people standing in front of them.
The city here is the city of dreams, the city of fantasy, always full of pictures and colors. "Every skyscraper has someone who is turning mad: all the madmen spend a few hours on the flying buttresses; there isn't a jaguar that some woman hasn't bred for the sheer joy of it. It is a tired city; it repeats itself in order to be remembered." The city is like a dream: anything that can be imagined can be dreamed of, but even the most bizarre dream is a riddle painting, in which desire is hidden, or fear of the opposite is hidden, like a dream. "The Ossapia on the surface was actually built in the image of the Dungeon by people who had died. It is said that between the twin cities, the living and the dead have become inseparable."
What author Calvino wants to say is all in the elegant descriptions. If one rushes to see the plot unfold, one misses countless beautiful visions, and the things that need to be imagined by the reader in the visions, that could happen. It is characterized by the fact that Marco Polo's narrative does not mention specific people or events, but rather makes generalizations at the level of the city, at the level of its inhabitants. Calvino draws on Marco Polo's narrative to erect a number of cities of very different styles. There are cities where there are only departures and no arrivals; cities where the roads twist and turn because some man dreamed of a beauty on the same night and left the curved paths behind by virtue of his impression to find the beauty the next day; cities that look a certain way from a distance and change as soon as you approach them; cities built on deep lakes in the earth; cities where people are eager to clean up, to carry away in reverential silence the yesterday's relics of yesterday in a silence full of reverence, which seems to be a rite sufficient to inspire religious devotion. The cities Marco Polo describes have one thing going for them: you can mentally roam, get lost, stop to enjoy the cool breeze, and then leave.
? Aside from the romantic and eerie city-like appearance, the cities here all seem to have some kind of magic that makes them inescapable and mesmerizing. It's both unreal and actual. "If you spend eight hours a day cutting onyx, shihua, and chrysoprase, your labor gives form to desire, and desire at the same time gives form to your labor; and while you think you're enjoying Anastasia, you're really only a slave to it. ?"
The book is best known for its "badge theory," a conversation mentioned in the documentary. Kublai thought that different cities were like badges, and that new information derived new meaning from that badge graphic, while also adding new meaning to the badge.? "If one day I familiarize myself with all the emblems," he asked Marco Polo, "won't that be enough to truly own my empire?" The Venetian replied, "Don't think so, King Khan. On that day, you will be but one badge among many."
"When you travel, you find that cities are undifferentiated: each one looks like any other, and they swap shapes, orders, and distances with each other. Unshapely winds and dust invade the continent, but your map preserves their differences: combinations of different natures, like the strokes of a name. They pronounce the same lines in different accents; they open their mouths differently to yawn the same way." The city of Cynthia, which is only ever a transition zone, even puts this sentiment into direct perspective: "Is there an outside to Cynthia? Or, no matter how far you go outside the city, do you only get from one transition zone to another and never get out?" Kublai Khan had noticed that Marco Polo's cities were pretty much all of the same mold, as if one could move from one to the other by changing the elements of the combination without having to move to travel. The meaning of traveling seems meaningless here. In terms of the kinds of elements, Kublai's feelings are correct, but each city has a different ration of elements, which creates differences within the same. At the same time? It is not the voice that speaks but the ear that listens that determines the story. It is not only the eye that reaches but your relationship with the city at the time that determines the feeling. The person who passes by without entering sees one city, the person who enters each time sees one city, and the person who is trapped inside and can never leave sees another city. You see one city when you first arrive and another when you never return. "Whatever the city really looks like, whatever is encased or hidden beneath the thick signboards, you leave Tamara without actually having discovered it. Outside the city, the land stretches emptily to the horizon; the sky opens up and clouds fly swiftly by. Chance and the wind determine the shape of the clouds, and at this moment you begin to speculate on the outlines: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant ......" In addition to this, Mark Polo recounts his state of mind when he visits the city: "Each time he arrives in a new city, the traveler rediscover a past he did not know: your defunct former self or what you have lost sovereignty over, this mutated sensation ambushes and watches over you in a foreign place without a master." This seems to give us another reason to set out.
? On several occasions, Kublai asked Marco Polo a question. "Have you never been to these cities at all, and are these all figments of your imagination?" "Yes, I have not been there, but I know they exist." "I feel like all these cities you're talking about are very similar, it couldn't be one city, could it?" "Yes, it is my hometown, Venice." That said, there's always a bit of clarity in this stream-of-consciousness book. The bustle, anxiety, panic, and noise of the city are extracted here, each given a characterization, and all put together to make one contradictory yet unified city. It could be Venice, it could be anywhere. "The more a man feels lost in the unfamiliar surroundings of a distant city, the more he becomes acquainted with the other cities he passes through on his way; and then he retraces the stages of his journey, and begins to recognize the city in which he first set sail and the places familiar to him in his youth, the environs of his home town, and the one little square in Venice where he spent his happy childhood."
What Invisible Cities is really about is perhaps different urban moods, or perhaps departure and return. It is only one city, but it is the city of all cities.
PS:
The book uses a lot of philosophical and beautiful phrases, like a city fable. For example, "At some point in your life, there will be more people you know who are dead than alive. That's when your heart refuses to accept more faces and more expressions, and every new face you meet is an old one, each of them seeking a suitable mask." There are many more beautiful and timeless quotes, recorded at the end, to be looked over later.
Memory is also exhausting: it turns over various markers to affirm the city's existence.
Within its boundaries, the inhabitants of the surrounding area can draw water by digging a deep vertical hole in the ground, but they cannot cross it. Its green perimeter matches the black outline of the subterranean lake; the unseen landscape determines the seen;.
This being so, we need not examine whether Jennobia should be classed as a happy or an unhappy city. There is no point in dividing the city into two categories, but if we want to categorize it, it should be the other two: the city that has been through the ages and still lets its desires dictate its appearance, and the city that has obliterated its desires or been obliterated by its desires.
If you want to know how dark it is around you, look for the faintest light in the distance
It is never the words that are false; it is the things themselves.
And so you begin to speculate whether the real pleasure of Rionia is the so-called enjoyment of new things, or the discarding, the clearing, the fine purging of the frequent filth, the fact that scavengers are welcomed as angels are welcomed, and that they carry away the relics of yesterday in reverential silence seems to be a rite sufficient to inspire religious piety, though perhaps because people don't want to think about things once they have thrown them away. them.
Lyssa, the city of melancholy, also has an invisible thread that links one creature to another in a certain moment, then loosens it, and stretches it again between the two moving points, drawing new shapes rapidly, so that the unhappy city harbors a happy one at every second, only it doesn't know it
The hell of the living does not always appear; and if it did, it would be in our daily life nowadays, but it would be a hell of the living. If there is, it is the hell in which we now live daily, and it is formed by our assembling together. There are two ways to avoid suffering, and for many, the first is easier, accepting hell and becoming a part of it so that we don't have to see it. The second is a bit risky, and one must always be on guard: identify people and things in hell that are not hell, learn to recognize them, keep them going, and give them space.