Invisible Cities

“It is the desperate moment when we discover that this empire, which had seemed to us the sum of all wonders, is an endless, formless ruin, that corruption’s gangrene has spread too far to be healed by our scepter, that the triumph over enemy sovereigns has made us the heirs of their long undoing.”

This passage reflects Kublai Khan’s disenchantment with empire. He senses that the corruption of the former sovereigns of the lands he has conquered has rubbed off on him. The metaphor of gangrene gives an abject quality to his empire’s decadence and indicates that he needs Polo for a sense of renewal.

“I could tell you how many steps make up the streets rising like stairways, and the degree of the arcades’ curves, and what kind of zinc scales cover the roofs; but I already know this would be the same as telling you nothing. The city does not consist of this, but of relationships between the measurements of its space and the events of its past.”

In describing the city of Zaira, Polo rejects the idea that one can get to know a city through empirical descriptions of its architecture. Instead, he believes that one must see the architectural features in relation to the events that have taken place. Thus, he implies that a city’s essence does not lie in its stony still-life splendors, but in its human life.

“However the city may really be, beneath this thick coating of signs, whatever it may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it. Outside, the land stretches, empty, to the horizon; the sky opens, with speeding clouds. In the shape that chance and wind give the clouds, you are already intent on recognizing figures: a sailing ship, a hand, an elephant.”

This passage conveys that one cannot get to know a city by merely reading its signs. However, the human propensity to look for signs to comprehend the world is such that people look for them in the arbitrary formations of the clouds. Thus, man’s search for meaning is eternal, and the use of the second-person singular imbues the text with a universalizing tone.