![]() ![]() ![]() Marco Polo speaks of 55 unique cities, each in its own short chapter titled with one of 11 possible titles, including those such as “Cities and memory,” “Hidden cities,” “Cities and names,” or “Cities and eyes.” Calvino’s structure was intentional - in a posthumously published interview in The Paris Review, Calvino said of I nvisible Cities that “the design … became the plot of a book that had no plot” and that “the architecture is the book itself.”Ĭalvino was a part of an experimental literature group known as “ OuLiPo” (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) which was formed by writers and mathematicians in France in the 1960s. Invisible Cities follows a beautiful mathematical structure that repeats chapter titles to form a cascading pattern (see here for a visual). “ Invisible Cities follows a beautiful mathematical structure that repeats chapter titles to form a cascading pattern” Soon their names and rhythms become entangled in his own imagination. Though the emperor is skeptical of the veracity of Marco Polo’s stories, he listens attentively to the descriptions of these invisible cities. The young explorer, a man by the name of Marco Polo, recounts stories of his travels to the emperor. The Khan’s own footprints of conquest are among these patterns and memories yet so, too, are the cycles of history and empire intertwined with the objects and signs of human dreams and remembrances. Nearing the end of his life, the aging emperor begins to realize that the boundless reaches of his empire encompass cities unseen and unknown to him - cities pulsating with unfamiliar patterns and memories. There’s a beautiful novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino called Invisible Cities, which narrates a fictional encounter between Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and a certain young Venetian explorer. We are at the top of the food chain, but species in the past that were at the top became extinct over time as well.T he novel Invisible Cities by Italian write Italo Calvino narrates a fictional encounter between Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and a certain young Venetian explorer. One day, evolution could result in a creation that will eventual overpower us and it would be our own fault. It talks about how people kill of the rats but after time, the rats become stronger and can resist our ways of extermination. In the last city Theodora, it’s evolution that destroys the city. But I could be totally wrong, like I said, this city was difficult for me to understand. I took this to mean that the population could explode and the city couldn’t support all the citizens. It talks about how there could be thousands of unborns waiting for their time. ![]() Or the city could be overrun by population. In this way, the city would literally die out. The first being that too many people die and the population can’t keep up with the mortality rate. The way I see it, the city could destroy itself in two ways. This city was difficult for me to understand but I’ll give it a shot anyway. In the third city Laudomia, it talks about the dead and the unborn. ![]() Not to mention that they are cut off from the world which will eventually result in their lack of growth also. That, or eventually, they will run out of materials to build anything else. One day the ‘mountain’ could fall, burying the people in all the things the discarded. The ‘trash’ is then stacked into a mountain that surrounds the city. The people in the city are so worried about having the newest and greatest thing, that each day, they throw everything from the previous day so they can start fresh. It’s their own selfishness that will one day result in its destruction. In the second city Leonia, their destruction is the opposite. In order to grow and become better, we must accept change. It becomes stagnate without growth of some kind. If you think about, it people continue to take and reuse, the city can never grow. In a way, it doesn’t seem that bad, but if you look at it in the grand scheme of things, it becomes pretty awful. The people take and steal things that do not beling to them in order to use them for something else. In the first city Clarice, the people that live there are at fault for the destruction of their city. And I think that this piece really illustrates that. It’s not always a illness that spreads or a natural disaster that wipes out all life. I think the small excerpts do a great job at breaking down the different ways that humankind can lead to its own demise. I really enjoyed the idea that each city was the cause for its own destruction. I really enjoyed Italo Calvino’s excerpts from Invisible Cities. ![]()
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