Photo credit David Cousin Marsy
Invisibles cities
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With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear. Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.’
‘I have neither desires nor fears,’ the Khan declared, ‘and my dreams are composed either by my mind or by chance.’
‘Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours.’
‘Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.’
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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Invisibile Cities of Italo Calvino by Dave McKean
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It is easy to get lost in Eudoxia: but when you concentrate and stare at the carpet, you recognize the street you were seeking in a crimson or indigo or magenta thread which, in a wide loop, brings you to the purple enclosure that is your real destination. Every inhabitant of Eudoxia compares the carpet's immobile order with his own image of the city, an anguish of his own, and each can find, concealed among the arabesques, an answer, the story of his life, the twists of fate.
Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
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enjoying calvino's marco/kublai slashfic immensely so far. i could be a polokhan girlie
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Photo credit David Cousin Marsy
Dans la série Les villes invisibles
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As the seasons passed and his missions continued, Marco mastered the tagging system and the filtering options and unwrangled ship names. Now his searches were the most precise and detailed that the Great Khan could wish and there was no question or curiosity which they did not satisfy. And yet each piece of information about a place recalled to the emperor’s mind that first freeform tag with which Marco had designated the place. The new fact received a meaning from that tag and also added to the tag a new meaning. Perhaps, Kublai thought, the archive is nothing but a zodiac of the mind’s phantasms.
“On the day when I know all the tags,” he asked Marco, “shall I be able to possess my fanfic, at last?”
And the Venetian answered: “Sire, do not believe it. On that day you will be a tag among tags.”
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"(...) in the seed of the city of the just, a malignant seed is hidden, in its turn: the certainty and pride of being in the right - and of being more just than many others who call themselves more just than the just. This seed ferments in bitterness, rivalry, resentment; and the natural desire of revenge on the unjust is colored by a yearning to be in their place and to act as they do. Another unjust city, though different from the first, is digging out its space within the double sheath of the unjust and just Berenices."
-- Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities (trs. William Weaver)
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