Invisible Cities

Italo Calvino, 1972, Published by Vintage, Random House group, in 1997

Food for thought? Food for imagination and food for creation. Inspirador para viajar por terras e países mas também para viajar parado, pelos ninhos onde nos vamos instalando. Cada cidade é única mas ao mesmo tempo universal. Dá vontade de fechar os olhos e sonhar com elas.
Algumas passagens favoritas:

Page 77 Baucis: There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much they avoid all contact; that they love as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence.

Page 82 Marco Polo describes a bridge, stone by stone.
"But which is the stone that supports the bridge?" Kublai Khan asks.
"The bridge is not supported by one stone or another," Marco answers, "but by the line of the arch that they form."
Khan reflects and then adds: "Why do you speak to me of the stones? It is only the arch that matters to me." Polo answers:"Without stones there is no arch."

Page 87 Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased."

Page 95 Adelma: You reach a 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 masks.

Page 98 "This is what I wanted to hear from you: confess what you are smuggling: moods, states of grace, elegies"

Page 114 Leonia: So you begin to wonder it its true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not, instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurring impurity.

Page 139 Until every shape has found its city, new cities will continue to be born

Page 165 The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together.There are two ways to escape suffering it. 1. accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. 2 The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn how to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.