Italo Calvino:
"... The Great Khan owns an atlas where all the cities of the
empire and the neighboring realms are drawn, building by building and street by
street, with walls, rivers, bridges, harbors, cliffs. He realizes that from
Marco Polo’s tales it is pointless to expect news of those places, which for
that matter he knows well: how at Kambalu, capital of China, three square cities
stand one within the other, each with four temples and four gates that are
opened according to the seasons; how on the island of Java the rhinoceros
rages, charging, with his murderous horn; how pearls are gathered on the ocean
bed off the coasts of Malabar.
Kublai asks Marco, “When you return to the West, will you
repeat to your people the same tales you tell me?”
“I speak and speak,” Marco says, “but the listener retains
only the words he is expecting. The description of the world to which you lend
a benevolent ear is one thing; the description that will go the rounds of the
groups of stevedores and gondoliers on the street outside my house the day of
my return is another; and yet another, that which I might dictate late in life,
if I were taken prisoner by Genoese pirates and put in irons in the same cell
with a writer of adventure stories. It is not the voice that commands the
story: it is the ear.
“At times I feel your voice is reaching me from far away,
while I am prisoner of a gaudy and unlivable present, where all forms of human
society have reached an extreme of their cycle and there is no imagining what
new forms they may assume. And I hear, from your voice, the invisible reasons
which make cities live, through which perhaps, once dead, they will come to
life again.”..."
('Invisible Cities', 1972)
