Jeni Dhodary’s Reviews > Invisible Cities > Status Update

“For those who pass it without entering, the city is one thing; it is another for those who are trapped by it and never leave. There is the city where you arrive for the first time; and there is another city which you leave never to return.”

“At the moment when I concentrate and reflect, I find myself again, always, in this garden, at this hour of the evening, in your august presence, though I continue, without a moment’s pause, moving up a river green with crocodiles or counting the barrels of salted fish being lowered into the hold.”

“You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”

“You take delight not in a city’s seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to yours. Or the question it asks you, forcing you to answer, like Thebes through the mouth of the Sphinx.”

“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.”

“…each man bears in his mind a city made only of differences, a city without figures and without form, and the individual cities fill it up.”

“Marco Polo imagine answering (or Kublai Khan imagined his answer) that the more one was lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cites, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the part from which he has set sail, and the familiar places of his youth, and the surroundings of home…”

“The eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things.”