Can The Cities Symbolize Our Lives?

Discussion in class:

“You advance always with your head turned back,” (28). In class, we reviewed this quote and found the met literature of it. Each section changes because of the previous section. You understand the section you read previously by reading the current section. This also has to do with life, you understand what you did in the past because of what you are or do in the present. Maybe we are physically living in the present, but mentally in the past.

Back to blogs about Invisible Cities:

Maybe the empire that Kublai Khan and Marco Polo keep on referring to is actually our imagination. On page 73 it says, “… The Great Khan watches his empire grow,” with every new city that is added and described, our imagination grows. We see different things and notice different things.

Later on, Polo describes a city that Kublai Khan dreamed about, Lalage. What if that city actually represents all dreams? The way it is describes made me think of it that way, “Its inhabitants arranged these invitations to rest in the night sky so that the moon would grant everything in the city the power to grow and grow endlessly,” (74). Perhaps our mind is the inhabitants and the dreams are the invitations. The dreams usually come at night when the moon is out, and we are sleeping. The moon has the power for everything to grow endlessly, which means that at night we do not just have one dream, but we dream on endlessly. They continue to grow until we wake up the next morning. Once the moon and the night sky are away, we stop dreaming.

“You walk on little wooden ties, careful not to set your foot in the open spaces…Below there is nothing for hundreds…of feet…you can glimpse the chasm’s bed,” (75). This quote represents the lives of people. You never know what can happen, if you make one mistake or a wrong turn, you can fall in that darkness which is equivalent to our death. The city, Octavia, is a symbol of human’s lives. Just as the last quote on the page says, “They know the net will last only so long,” we know that one day our lives will end. We do not know when or how, but it will.

There was a connection between Trading Cities 4 and Thin Cities 5, they both use the word: spider-webs. Page 75, “…Octavia, the spider-web city,” and on page 76, “…spider-webs of intricate relationships seeking a form,” show the author using the word. It could be that Calvino is just repeating a word, like how I repeated the word dream six times earlier. However, Calvino writes what he does because there is a meaning behind it. What is the meaning behind repetition? Another example is earlier on in the book when he repeats that Marco Polo was ignorant of the Levant languages and that he could only express himself with gestures. Repetition is something used a lot in this book, and I still have no figured out what for.