Rather I would sit in this cafe on this cold Chicago day, with the wind blowing outside; wrapped up and warm, eating a lemon poppy seed muffin, with strong coffee coursing through my veins, reading two books in front of me; Invisible Cities and the Broken Palmyrah, oceans apart and yet, does not the Atlantic meet the Pacific, the Pacific the Indian and the Indian the Atlantic again; and when these oceans meet, does not the wind blow differently, and the land rise spectacularly, and the water throb strangely?
Oceans apart and yet, I read Calvino again and dream of other cities and the city that I carry within me, wherever I go, though it breaks my heart again and again.
"it is pointless trying to decide whether Zenobia is to be classified among happy cities or among the unhappy. It makes no sense to divide cities into these two species, but rather into another two: those that through the years and the changes continue to give their form to desires, and those in which desires either erase the city or are erased by it."
and earlier
"Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves. At times even the names of the inhabitants remain the same, and their voices' accent, and also the features of the faces; but the gods who live beneath names and above places have gone off without a word and outsiders have settled in their place. It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which, by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one".
No comments:
Post a Comment