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Trading Cities 3
2003.01.01 13:04
[The following is from Italo Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES:]
Trading Cities 3
When he enters the territory of which Eutropia is the capital, the traveler
sees not one city but many, of equal size and not unlike one another,
scattered over a vast, rolling plateau. Eutropia is not one, but all these
cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others are empty; and
this process is carried out in rotation. Now I shall tell you how. On the
day when Eutropia's inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can
bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the
people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to
move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as
new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another
landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different
pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is renewed from move to move, among
cities whose exposure or declivity or streams or winds make each site
somehow different from the others. Since their society is ordered without
great distinctions of wealth or authority, the passage from one function to
another takes place almost without jolts; variety is guaranteed by the
multiple assignments, so that in the span of a lifetime a man rarely returns
to a job that has already been his.
Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty
chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed;
they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open
alternative mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the
empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to
whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.
Trading Cities 3
2003.01.01 13:04
[The following is from Italo Calvino's INVISIBLE CITIES:]
Trading Cities 3
When he enters the territory of which Eutropia is the capital, the traveler
sees not one city but many, of equal size and not unlike one another,
scattered over a vast, rolling plateau. Eutropia is not one, but all these
cities together; only one is inhabited at a time, the others are empty; and
this process is carried out in rotation. Now I shall tell you how. On the
day when Eutropia's inhabitants feel the grip of weariness and no one can
bear any longer his job, his relatives, his house and his life, debts, the
people he must greet or who greet him, then the whole citizenry decides to
move to the next city, which is there waiting for them, empty and good as
new; there each will take up a new job, a different wife, will see another
landscape on opening his window, and will spend his time with different
pastimes, friends, gossip. So their life is renewed from move to move, among
cities whose exposure or declivity or streams or winds make each site
somehow different from the others. Since their society is ordered without
great distinctions of wealth or authority, the passage from one function to
another takes place almost without jolts; variety is guaranteed by the
multiple assignments, so that in the span of a lifetime a man rarely returns
to a job that has already been his.
Thus the city repeats its life, identical, shifting up and down on its empty
chessboard. The inhabitants repeat the same scenes, with the actors changed;
they repeat the same speeches with variously combined accents; they open
alternative mouths in identical yawns. Alone, among all the cities of the
empire, Eutropia remains always the same. Mercury, god of the fickle, to
whom the city is sacred, worked this ambiguous miracle.