Window to the Past

“All these beauties will already seem familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicoloured lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy towards those who now believe they have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy, that time.” (Calvino, 7). Life seems to be a journey through these invisible cities, a journey that takes us across the moments and experiences we come across in life, those instants we believe to be unique and authentic when truly they are simply a slight variation of something wither we or someone else has already lived. This is exactly what Calvino is talking about in this excerpt form his book. The dilemma surges when we come across the question of whether life is an encounter with one or more invisible cities or an invisible city itself. Invisible Cities is a blend, an enigmatic concoction between reality and fantasy or rather, memory. It is curious, that with time memory seems to shift, to fade into fantasy. Things that have occurred in the distant past, how can we have any evidence that they actually happened for us? How can we recall it was that we felt at that particular moment, or the way in which the order of events exactly took place? There is no evidence of it. There is no way for us to know that it actually happened. Moments, experiences, even those that we hold dear, in the end they are nothing more than memories, memories that wane into distant, dampened dreams and fantasies. Calvino’s invisible cities are all but notions, perceptions of distant realities. They are memories.