No Invisible Cities

So as I mentioned before, I read the book according to the type of city. I did this to find patterns between each city that were put together under the same category.

Cities & Memory. Diomira, Isidora, Zaira, Zora and Maurilia. They all have something to do with memories, obviously. Dimomira, the foreigner feels like all the things from this city are familiar. Isidora is the desired city, the city of the foreigner’s dreams. However, it is like a memory because in the desired city the man is a young man, but here he is already old, therefore, “desires are already memories” (pg. 8) Zaira consists of the relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past. The past events are all parts of the memories.

Before I say what Zora has to do with memories, I have to say Zora is the one that made me more curious of the five memory cities… “Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget.” (Pg.15) “In order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her.” (Pg. 16)

Then no one has ever seen Zora because no one can ever forget it once they’ve seen it. Then how can Marco Polo describe the city so richly? This immediately made me go back to the connection we had done in class about the Emperor’s New Clothes. Maybe there really are no cities, and he is just making up all the descriptions for the Kublai Khan. Can that be possible?

Maurilia is quite complex too. “It is pointless to ask whether the new ones are better or worse than the old, since there is no connection between them, just as the old post cards do not depict Maurilia as it was, but a different city which by chance, was called Maurilia, like this one.” (Pg. 31)  It this part telling us that the past and present of this city is so different it seems like a completely different one? Is it another city? Or does this follow my theory that there are really no cities at all? After all, the title is Invisible Cities….