Chapter 2 Chapter two

"Other messengers warn me of famine, extortion, and criminal plots, or report to me newly discovered malachite mines, favorable prices for ermine furs, or proposals for the sale of metal-inlaid swords. But what about you?" demanded the Great Khan Polo, "You come back from the same remote place, and you can only tell me what goes through someone's mind when he sits on the threshold at night to enjoy the shade. What is the use of your travels?" "It is evening now. We are sitting on the steps of your palace. There is a breeze blowing now," replied Marco Polo. "Whatever my words make you imagine around you, you can look at it from this vantage point, even if it is not a palace but a village built on stilts, even if the wind smells of mud from the bay."

"My gaze seems to belong to an absent-minded brooder—I admit it. But what about you? You've been to the seas of many islands, to the frozen prairies, and to the mountains, and you're no better than a man who doesn't leave his house. stronger." The Venetians knew that Khubilai was angry with him because he wanted to follow his own train of thought more clearly; therefore, Marco's reply was part of the Khan's inner dialogue.In other words, it doesn't matter whether the two of them talk loudly or think silently.In fact, they were silent, with half-closed eyes, lying on the soft cushions of their hammocks, smoking long onyx pipes.Marco Polo imagined himself answering (and perhaps Kublai imagined him answering) that the more one feels lost in the unfamiliar surroundings of a distant city, the more one understands the other cities he passes through; During the stage, he began to know the city where he first sailed, the places he was familiar with when he was young, the environment of his hometown and a small square where he spent his happy childhood in Venice.At this time, Kublai Khan interrupted or imagined interrupting (maybe Marco Polo imagined himself being interrupted) by asking a question, the question was about: "When you go forward Do you always turn your head?" Or "Do you always see things behind you?" Or, "Is your journey always in the old days?"

These questions are for Marco Polo to explain (or imagine himself explaining, or others imagine him explaining, or finally manage to explain to himself) that what he is looking for is always ahead, and that, even if it is in the past, that The past also changes gradually with his journey, for the traveler's past changes with the path he takes: not the most recent past, in which a day is added to each passing day, but the more distant past.Every time a traveler arrives in a new city, the traveler will rediscover a past that he does not know: the old self you no longer exist or the things you have lost sovereignty.

Marco arrives at a city; he sees someone in the square living a life that might be his, or passing a moment that might be his; long ago, if he had stopped in time, this moment might have taken his place; or, A long time ago, if he had chosen another road at the fork in the road, after a long wandering, he might have taken the place of the man in the square.Now he is squeezed out of that real or supposed past; he cannot stop; he must go on to another town where another past, or his possible The future is just that the future has become someone else's present.A future unfulfilled is only a twig of the past: a dead twig.

"Travel to rediscover the past?" Khan asked him, and the question could also be put another way: "To recover the lost future?" Marco's answer: "The other place is a negative mirror. The traveler sees how little he has, and how much he has never had and never will have." City and Memory No. 5 In Moreria, travelers accept invitations to visit the city while admiring some old postcards with pictures of what it used to be: the same square where a hen once stood is now a bus stop , the bandstand has now been transformed into a flyover, and the place where the two women with white sun umbrellas are located is the current munitions factory.If the traveler does not want to disappoint the local residents, he must praise the city in the picture and express that he thinks it is better than the city in front of him, but he must be careful not to let his emotion exceed a certain limit: it may be admitted that it is as simple as Compared with the old Maurilia, the capital Maurilia has lost some elegant temperament, which cannot be supplemented by prosperity. This temperament can only be appreciated in pictures now; There is no elegance in the rustic Morelia, and if it has not changed, people today will probably not see it; in any case, the capital has a special attraction today, because by its current appearance, People can look back on the past and express their nostalgia for the past.

Don't tell them that different cities sometimes appear one after another in the same place with the same name, and live and die without knowing and hearing each other.Sometimes even the name, the tone of the voice, and even the countenance of the inhabitants remain unchanged; but the gods who dwell beneath the name and above the place have silently departed, and other strangers have taken their place.It is pointless to ask whether the new god is better or worse than the old one, since there is no relationship between the two, just as the picture on a postcard is not the old Maurilia but another one that happens to be called Maurilia as well. city.

City and Desire 4 In the center of the gray stone city of Fedora there is a metal building, each room of which has a crystal sphere, and in each sphere a blue city can be seen, which is a model of a different Fedora.Fedora could have been either of those aspects, but for some reason, became what we see now.In any era, someone always conceived some method based on Fedora he saw at that time, so as to transform it into an ideal city, but when he made the model, Fedora was already different from before, and yesterday The future that is still considered possible is today a toy in a glass ball.The building that houses the crystal ball is now the museum of Fedora: citizens come here to choose the city that suits their wishes, look at it, and imagine their reflection in the jellyfish pool (the water in the canal would have flowed into it if it hadn't dried up). In this pool), imagine the view from the high covered box seat next to the special road for elephants (now forbidden to enter the city), imagine the fun of sliding down the spiral tower of the mosque (the foundation for construction has never been found) .

O great Khan, the map of your empire must be able to accommodate at the same time the great stone city of Fedora and all the small Fedora in glass balls, not because they are equally real, but because they are equally hypothetical.The former contains what was considered necessary when it was not needed; the latter contains what seems possible at one moment and is no longer possible at another. Cities and Marks III The traveler does not know what city awaits on the road; he wonders what its palaces, barracks, mills, theaters, and shopping malls are like.In every city of the empire, every building is different, and in a different order: yet, as soon as the foreign stranger arrives in the unknown city, his eyes follow the flowing canals, the gardens, and the rubbish-heaps, Skimming past the tapered pavilions and haylofts, one immediately recognizes the Dauphin's palace, the temple of the high priest, the tavern, the prison, and the poor quarters.This confirms - some say - the hypothesis that each man has in his mind a city of differences, without shape or outline, which must be filled by individual cities.

That's not the case with Miao Yi.You can sleep, make utensils, cook, hoard gold, undress, rule, sell things, and consult prophets anywhere in the city.Any of its steeples could have been a leprosarium or a bathhouse for slave girls.The traveler walks about confused: he cannot make out the faces of the city, and the clear faces he keeps in his mind are confused.He reasoned like this: If every moment of existence belongs to its whole, then Wei, Miaoyi is an inseparable place of existence.But why does this city exist?What line divides inside and outside, the sound of wheels and the howl of wolves?

skinny city 2 The city I am going to talk about now is Zenobia. Its beauty is that although it is located in a dry area, the whole city is built on high stilts, and the houses are built of bamboo and zinc sheets, supported by brackets of different heights. A criss-cross of pavilions and terraces, connected by ladders and suspended passages, culminating in conical-roofed gazebos, casks, weather vanes, jutting tackle, fishing rods, and hooks. No one remembers that the people who founded Zenobia made the city this way based on their needs, orders, or desires. Therefore, it is hard to say whether the city we see now meets the ideal. Built and built, perhaps it has been enlarged and the original design is no longer recognizable.One thing is certain, however: if you asked a Zenobia resident to describe his idea of ​​a happy life, he would be talking about a city like Zenobia, with stakes and suspended ladders, perhaps Not quite the same Zenobia, with waving flags and streamers, but still assembled from components from the original model.

That being the case, we don't have to study whether Zenobia should be classified as a happy city or an unhappy city.It is unreasonable to divide cities into two categories in this way. If we want to classify them, it should be another two categories: one is the city that has gone through all kinds of vicissitudes and still let desire determine its appearance, and the other is the city that has obliterated or been obliterated by desire. one of the cities of trade Go eighty miles against the northwest wind, and you will arrive at Eufemia, where merchants from seven countries gather every year at the summer and winter solstice, spring and autumn equinoxes.Arriving with ginger and cotton, sails depart laden with pistachio nuts and poppy seeds, while the caravan, freshly unloaded with cardamom and raisins, is saddling rolls of golden cotton for the return journey. bag.However, these people crossing the river and crossing the desert are not just for buying and selling, because inside and outside the Khan’s empire, shopping malls can exchange goods anywhere, and the goods are displayed at the feet, which are also yellow straw mats. There's the same fly-proof awning, touted with the same hypocritical markdowns.You do not come to Eufemia just to trade, but to sit at night on sacks or vats, or lie on rugs, and hear stories by the fires around the market place: if someone says— —such as "Wolf," "Sister," "Treasure," "Battle," "Mange," "Lovers"—everyone else had to tell a story about Wolf, Sister, Treasure, Mange, Lovers, or Battle.It's a long way home, and when you leave Eufemia, the city where memories are bought and sold on solstices and solstices, equinoxes and equinoxes, you know you'll be Search memory for stories, and your wolf becomes another wolf, your sister becomes another sister, your battle becomes another battle. … Marco Polo had only arrived recently, and he didn’t know the languages ​​of the eastern Mediterranean countries at all. To express himself, he could only take out the things in the luggage bag—drums, kippers, necklaces made of warthog teeth— —and gesturing to them, jumping, hooting in surprise or fright, imitating howling wolves and hooting owls. The emperor sometimes did not understand the relationship between each link in the story; various objects may have multiple meanings: a quiver full of arrows may indicate the outbreak of war or a fruitful hunt, or it may be a shop selling weapons; The hourglass may represent the passing of time or the time of the past, or it may be the place where the hourglass was shaped. But the feature of the events or news reported by this inarticulate messenger that most interested Khubilai was the space around them, the vacuum created by the absence of language.The city that Marco Polo described had the advantage: you could wander in thought, get lost, stop to enjoy the cool breeze, and leave. Over time, Marco began to substitute words for objects and gestures in the story: at first interjections, isolated nouns, and hard verbs, followed by phrases, extended comments, similes, and metaphors.The foreigner understood the language of the emperor, and it can also be said that the emperor understood the language of the foreigner. However, the communication between the two seems to be not as pleasant as before: Of course, if you want to list the most important things in each province and city-monuments, markets, clothing, flowers and trees-language is very difficult. Useful, but there were many days and nights when Poirot couldn't find the right words to describe life in these places, so he gradually resorted to gestures, expressions and glances. In this way, after stating the basic information in accurate language, he will make silent comments for each city: raise your hands, palms forward or backward or to the sides, and the movements are straight or crooked, fast or slow.It was a new kind of dialogue: the khan's ringed, white hand responded with solemn gestures to the firm, flexible hand of the merchant.A tacit understanding was gradually reached between the two, and their hands began to adopt fixed postures. The repetition or change of these postures indicated the change of mood.New product samples continue to enrich the vocabulary of items, but the content of silent reviews tends to be closed and stagnant.There was also less interest on both sides to adopt this method again; when they talked, there was silence and stillness for the most part.