Invisible Cities

‰ЫПThe wares, too, which the vendors display on their stalls are valuable not in themselves but as signs of other things ‰Ы_. Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПMarco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man‰ЫЄs place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real of hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else‰ЫЄs present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.‰Ыќ

‰ЫПI thought: ‰ЫчYou 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.‰ЫЄ‰Ыќ