Category: Invisible Cities S20

This was an absolutely splendid read and I thoroughly enjoyed the experience of traversing through the various cities. There were simply too many cities that stood out, but I’ll do my best in narrowing down my favorite ones. Octavia, the city of spider webs, hovering over the void, captured my interest right away. The life of its inhabitants relied on the net to continually support them. However, as time progresses, there is a sense of uncertainty that exits because the net won’t last forever. I thought this sense of uncertainty connects to our unease and uncertainty we face today. With how COVID-19 is panning out and the multitude of disasters, uncertainty seems scary. I also loved Valdrada with its reflections and Esmeralda where there is no repetition.

Although these cities did not remind me of a particular city in real life, Armilla and Zenobia reminded me of fictional places. Armilla, the city of water pipes, reminds me of the game Super Mario Bros. In the game, Mario travels through pipes and I loved how people Armilla did the same. Zenobia, the city of heights, reminds me of Fortree city in the game Pokemon Emerald. In Fortree city, there are numerous ladders and people travel across platforms and hanging sidewalks, just like Zenobia.

Despite the vivid details, much of the cities encapsulated more than just objects and descriptions. For example, Zaira, a city that contains its past, cannot be simply described by what it has. The line, “the city, however, does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand written in the corners of the steets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lightning rods, the poles of the flags, eery segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations scrolls,” encompasses this concept of history and the passage of time. These conceptual details would largely depend on who’s creating it in the virtual world, but if it were up to me, showing little wears of time in the buildings and having various statues and monuments would aid in creating this abstract concept. In this city, since it is about the past, being able to discover and read up on its history would help tremendously in exemplifying what Zaira would be like.

Throughout the novel, the use of time was used to convey an impression of the city. Most commonly, it was used to give an ominous feel of uncertainty or destruction. In the case of Octavia, time represented a sense of uncertainty and impending doom. In Leonia, time conveyed the message of innovation and eventually the destruction from excess garbage and its own innovation. Time also represented a loss of morals and decay as shown in Clarice and Eutropia.

As I was reading through the many descriptions of cities in Invisible Cities, I tried to imagine which of the ones depicted had some sort of resemblance with any city I had visited before. This was a bit of a challenge with cities that had more abstract descriptions, particularly for those labeled as “Cities & the Dead”. However, one particular city that stood out to me was the City of Esmeralda, a “city of water”, with “a network of canals and a network of streets [that] span and intersect each other” (79). I found this city quite memorable due to its dynamism: with its network of uneven paths able to be traversed by boat or by foot, there seems to be an infinite possibility of routes to take. With the different “steps, landings, cambered bridges and hanging streets”, people of Esmeralda are spared of a repetitive path, and can always find new routes leading to the same destinations (79). 

Another reason why I find the city of Esmeralda memorable is that it reminds me of Zhujiajiao (朱家角) a watertown in the outskirts of Shanghai that I got to visit during a day trip in my Sophomore Spring semester. Though my trip to Zhujiajiao was short, the town was so interesting and fun to explore due to its various bridges, canals, and small shops that my experience there is still fresh in my mind. Interestingly no matter where we went, we didn’t really get lost – many parts of the town were so memorable that it was easy to retrace one’s steps and go back to where one was originally. The network of canals and streets of Esmeralda also instantly brought to mind a short boat trip I took during my day trip in Zhujiajiao. Even though it lasted less than 5 minutes, it provided an interesting viewpoint of the town, where I could see the many zigzags and levels that made up the town. Overall, these similarities between both cities made me really appreciate reading about Esmeralda, as it allowed me to remember Zhujiajiao and think of it in a different light as I think back to my experience there 2 years ago. In a way, this reminds me of Marco Polos’ statement, “Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places”.

Time is used in Fedora as an inevitable agent in shaping people’s perceptions and ideas of the city as well as an obstacle to the desired changes in the city that exist in its inhabitants’ imaginations. The creation of the blue globes is someone’s hopeful imagination of a utopic Fedora, but in the time they used to create it, the city changes drastically causing their future to be restrained to a glass globe. In this sense, their realization becomes invalid both through the warping of their perceptions of what the city could be due to the new image of a changed Fedora and in the impossibility of completing their imagined reality because of physical changes in the city. In this sense time stomps out a branch of what Fedora could have been, as the city evolves into following another path while the creator envisions creating a unique branch of their own. 

Time also functions as something that results in the preservation of ideas and beliefs of what Fedora should be. This is done through the use of a museum with the globes, displaying the immortalized visions of Fedora. In a contradictory manner, Marco Polo also hints at time not necessarily being a hindrance or an obstacle resulting in the death of Fedora’s realities, as he notes that these visions are as “equally real” as the stone Fedora of today. This is because the Fedora of today was created or shaped when it was “accepted as necessary” but “not yet so,” as it too existed as an imagined reality before its completion. In this sense, Fedora’s inhabitants’ imagined city is also possible as they all existed at one point as “assumptions” along with the big, stone Fedora.

A city that especially stood out to me was Esmeralda because of several reasons. Firstly, the name of the city reminds me of a childhood game that I used to play with my family. It was a card game where each player had to make predictions about how many card combinations they will be able to play out based on the available cards in their hand. The combinations were set by the game’s rules and each person’s turn was affected by the decisions and actions of other players, therefore it was not easy to predict the right amount of combinations you would be able to play out. At the end of each round points were calculated based on how many predictions each player got right. In addition to counting points among the players, my godfather had come up with an additional set of rules which included Esmeralda – an invisible player who also scored points after each round based on the performance of others. The ultimate goal of the game was to beat Esmeralda and score more points than her. I remember being very bewildered about who Esmeralda was when I first started to play the game when I was young. I always associated her with a mystical creature and was almost afraid of her “presence” in the game. Only when I grew up I learned that Esmeralda was purely an invention to make the game more dynamic, interesting and challenging, yet my strong perception of her as a mystical creature never went away.

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Secondly, out of all cities described in the book Esmeralda spoke to me the most because it immediately reminded me of New York – a city that I lived in for four months during my Junior Year Spring semester. “And so Esmeralda’s inhabitants are spared the boredom of following the same streets every day…each inhabitant can enjoy every day the pleasure of a new itinerary to reach the same places” – this quote resonated a lot with my personal experience in New York which was to always try to take a new route to get to my destination, as there are countless parallel streets in the city. Although they may seem similar from the outside, each street is different from the previous – I always discovered either a new coffee shop, a new park or dog day care on each street that I walked on. I loved exploring New York on foot, as the city seemed so walkable despite the occasional bike rider nearly crashing in me and cars honking everywhere. Whenever I had to go somewhere further, just walking was often not an option, especially if I was in a hurry. Then I had to explore other transportation methods that New York offers. “…the network of routes is not arranged on one level, but follows instead an up-and-down course of steps, landings, cambered bridges, hanging streets” – this quote reminds me of the type of public transport that I used the most in New York – the iconic subway. The subway system in the city seemed so vast and almost always I could count on finding a station nearby and teleporting one level down to continue my journey in the underground. The subway system was also always full of rats which is also mentioned about Esmeralda: “below, the rats run in the darkness of the sewers, one behind the other’s tail, along with conspirators and smugglers”. The second part of the quote also reminds me of New York, as it was a city where I sometimes experienced some dangerous and frightening moments because of people’s weird and unpredictable behavior.

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Lastly, another quote about Esmeralda that reminded me strongly of New York was: “a map of Esmeralda should include, marked in different colored inks, all these routes, solid and liquid, evident and hidden”. The part about different colored inks reminded me of the New York subway map which is filled with seemingly tangled colored lines, each color representing a metro line. The map was especially hard to navigate in the beginning when I moved to New York. In addition, New York’s map is filled with tangible and intangible routes. For example, the dotted ferry lines on the Hudson river seemed far less tangible than solid streets represented in the map and took more time to learn to navigate. However, once mastered, they opened up new and unexpected ways to discover the never-ending city of New York.