ITALO CALVINO, ‘INVISIBLE CITIES’
The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and to content.
The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things…
The one contains what is accepted as necessary when it is not yet so; the others, what is imagined as possible and, a moment later, is possible no longer.
You could wander through them in thought, become lost, stop and enjoy the cool air, or run off.
Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules and absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.
But no one greets anyone’s eyes lock for a second, then draft away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.
The city exists and it has a simple secret: it knows only departures, not returns.
Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.
The city that they speak of has much of what is needed to exist, whereas the city that exists on its site, exists less.
Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased.
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, or each one it finds the most suitable mask.
It is our eyelids that separate them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.
The city does not know that its only moments of generous abandon are those when it becomes detached from itself, when it lets go, expands.
But the more they sharpen their eyes, the less they can discern a continuous line.
“The inferno of the 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 the 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.”