Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”

Memory and Identity

The city of Valdrada is built on the shores of a lake. All the good and evil that occurs in one Valdrada repeats in the other Valdrada, its reflection, and even though the cities are identical, every occurrence appears inverted in the two cities. This city depicts the externalization of our intents — the difference between our perceived and reflected selves. The very act of reflection on our actions and past selves changes how we remember them, often altering our memories to align with our self-identity. Reconstructive memory, in psychology, explains how we reconstruct our memories each time we recall them. We don’t remember them in the exact manner they occurred, and this is shaped by our feelings and perception of the event. This is why the traveler’s remote past changes according to the route he follows. The events of the past remain the same, but his perception and relationship with the past change as his identity starts to change when he starts undertaking more journeys. This is an interesting idea because we tend to think of life in terms of the ‘road not taken’ or the butterfly effect — all the different possible future selves that we could be, but Calvino arrives at this idea in reverse. How many versions of our past selves can we meet? Every new experience reshapes the meaning of our earlier ones; in that sense, changing the future would also change the meaning we derive from our past, or maybe, deepen that meaning. The more you visit new cities, the better you understand the ones you came from. “The jam of the past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement, this is what you would find at the end of your journey.” (p. 99) This perhaps means the end of life itself. It’s the entirety of life that we draw meaning from, not just the linear progression of events.

Conceptual Frames Shaping Perception

The book emphasizes the boundary between our inner world, the ego, and the external world. We perceive and understand the world by comparison — through personal baselines which evolve with us. Each new experience is interpreted against what we already know. Marco Polo suggests a theory that every man bears a city made only of differences in his mind, without form or figures. The individual cities then fill this up. One way to understand this is through an example of a simple object like a cup. I might have a 14-ounce black cup as a baseline for my understanding of the idea of a cup, and every time I see a new cup, I am not registering every bit of its information from scratch, but rather taking in only the distinctions compared to my baseline cup, as new information. I am looking at this new cup as ‘pink’ or being able to hold ‘2 ounces more’ rather than looking at it for what it is, without comparisons. “Every time I describe a city, I am saying something about Venice. To distinguish the other cities’ qualities, I must speak of a first city that remains implicit. For me, it is Venice.” (Marco Polo, p 86).

Echoes of the Ego

But as you travel more, the differences are lost, and cities start resembling each other. This, I think, is because, at some point, the traveler stops comparing everything with his baseline identity and broadens his perspective. Now, he compares every new city with every other city he has visited and starts mixing up the elements. At this point, he compares the similarities instead of the distinctions in cities. When Marco Polo arrives at the city of Trude, he thinks he has landed at the same airport he had taken off from. “You can resume your flight whenever you like, but you will arrive at another Trude, absolutely the same, detail by detail. The world is covered by a sole Trude which does not begin and does not end. Only the name of the airport changes.” (p. 128) It brings to mind the song Hotel California — you can check out any time you want, but you can never leave. Traveling to any place only to end up in Trude is a somewhat scary idea. It emphasizes the role of a distinct self-identity or the ego of the traveler. As the traveler begins to lose his identity, he also starts to lose the cities because the cities are just an externalization of his inner self. The atlas, however, preserves all the differences among the cities because it only contains the knowledge of these places and not their experience.

To give the self an identity is to already lose it.

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Whether to Put Things into Boxes or Not?

Kublai Khan thinks of each city as if it were a game of chess, and if he can just learn the rules, he gets to conquer these cities even though he might never know what is contained in all these cities. This reminds me of what Neil Tyson once said, that we cannot fully know even a heap of salt; we only know the molecular structure of a single unit and extend that understanding to the rest of the heap. The cities of Zemrude and Aglaura are cities that exist in multiplicity. No aspect of the city is truer than the other, and that, in a way, disturbs the reader because we want to have an idea of these cities. We want to put them into boxes. Generalizations and pattern recognition help us process more information. It is important for constructing meaning out of things.

Knowledge and Experience

But even if there were an ‘invisible order that sustains cities’, it does not help extinguish our quest for knowledge, for “the city consists of the relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past”. Experiences cannot be transferred through descriptions, nor explained in words. Marco Polo reiterates this when he says that names point to things that mean “other” things — words reduce the experience of a place. This is why Kublai Khan acknowledges the silence between different elements of a story, understanding that what is left unsaid often holds more truth. But eventually, Kublai Khan comes to see that words themselves are not as deceitful. Calvino reminds us that “falsehood is never in words; it is in things.” Even if our descriptions of our experiences are accurate, reality itself remains unstable, and our perspectives, subjective.