Chapter 4 Chapter Four

Biting a pipe with an amber handle, Kublai Khan listened to Marco Polo tell a story, looking indifferent, while arching his toes in satin slippers, his beard hanging down to an amethyst necklace.These days, at night, there is always a faint melancholy oppressing his heart. "Your city is non-existent. Perhaps there never was such a city. There never will be. Why amuse yourself with these stories? I know full well that my empire is rotting, spreading the virus to pecks like corpses in a swamp. The crows that feed on it and the bamboo trees that feed on it. Foreigners, why don’t you tell me this? Why are you lying to the Emperor of Tartar?”

Polo knew that the emperor was in a bad mood, and it was best not to make him angry. "Yes, the Empire is sick, but what's worse is that it's getting ready to habituate itself to being sick. I explored for this purpose: to examine the traces of joy still visible, and to measure how short it is. If you want to know how dark it is around , you have to pay attention to the faint light in the distance, " Khan sometimes felt a sudden sense of contentment.That's when he'd leave the cushion and stand up and stride down the blanketed path.Leaning on the railing of the pavilion, he looked around the entire imperial garden with confused eyes, and the lamps hung on the cedar trees illuminated the garden. "But I know," he would say, "that my empire is constructed like a crystal, that its molecular formula is a perfect arrangement. The agitation of the elements produces a wonderfully hard diamond, a vast, faceted, transparent Why does your journey always stop at disappointing phenomena, never seeing this unchanging program? Why do you always linger in needless sorrow? Why hide his glorious glory from the emperor. Doomed?"

Mark replied: "Khan, at one gesture from you, the most perfect and unique city will raise its perfect walls, but I will collect ashes for other cities that make way for it, which have disappeared and will never be restored." Reconstruction will not be remembered. Only when you realize the sad residual value that no gem can compensate, can you calculate how heavy the final diamond should be, otherwise you will be wrong in the first place." Cities and Marks Five No one knows better than you, wise Kublai Khan, that the words describing a city must not be confused with the city itself.However, there is indeed a relationship between the two.If I were to describe to you Olivia, a city rich in products, I could only cite its palace inlaid with gold and silver and the upholstered cushions with tassels beside the lattice windows to illustrate its prosperity.Behind the door screen of the inner courtyard, rotating water pipes are spraying the grass, and white peacocks spread their tails.From these words, you can immediately imagine how the soot and oily smoke that enveloped Olivia stained its houses, and how mobile trailers smashed passersby against the walls on noisy streets.If I were to describe the industriousness of the inhabitants, I'd have to speak of the saddle shop smelling of leather, of the women weaving brown matting as they talked and laughed, and of the canals that drove the mill carts; but, in your wise mind, these words The resulting image is like a mandrel that depends on the gears of a lathe, and thousands of hands repeat the same action thousands of times at a predetermined speed.If I were to explain to you how Olivia's spirit tends toward freer life and finer civilization, I'd mention the woman who glides by night in a shining canoe across the mouth of the Blue River; but that's just to remind you, In the suburbs where men and women walk nightly in parade like sleepwalkers, there are often people who laugh out loud in the dark, leading to streams of jokes and sarcasm.

Here's something you may not know: I can't talk about Olivia in other words.If one were to get an Olivia with a lattice window and a peacock, a saddle shop and a mat weaver, a canoe and an estuary, it must be a hideous, fly-infested black hole, and to describe it I had to repeat Use metaphors like soot, screeching wheels, repetitive motion, taunting, and more.It is never the words that are false; it is the things themselves. skinny city 4 Sovolonia is a city made of two halves.One half is a roller coaster with a steep hump, a motorized horse with a brake chain, a wheel with a rotating cage, a motorcycle rider who competes with death, and a big spinning top with a swing.The other half of the city is composed of banks, factories, palaces, slaughterhouses, schools, etc. built of granite, marble, and concrete.This half is permanent, and the other half is temporary. Once the time limit expires, it will be uprooted, disassembled, transported away, and transplanted to the open space of the other half of the city.In this way, on a certain day every year, workers will unload marble window sills, tear down stone walls, concrete towers, government buildings, monuments, shipyards, oil refineries and hospitals, load them on trailers, and transport them according to the established route year after year. Walk.The half-seat of Sovonia left behind, counting the screams from the shooting range, merry-go-round and rushing roller coaster, how many days and months it will take before the convoy returns, and the complete life can be recreated. start.

Trade Cities III Setting foot on the region of which Eutropia is the capital, the traveler sees not one city but many cities of equal size and similar shape scattered over a large undulating plateau.Eutropia is not one city but a general term for cities, although only one of them is inhabited and the rest are empty; this happens in turn.I will tell you in detail now.If the inhabitants of Eutropia one day get bored and feel that they can no longer bear their jobs, their relatives, their houses, their lives, their debts, whoever they have to greet and whoever greets them, the whole population will move to the next neighbourhood. The new city was empty waiting for them; and then each of them would have a new job, another wife, a new view through the windows, new amusements with new friends and new gossip.Thus they live anew each time they move, and the direction, slope, stream, and wind of each site make them different.Their society is orderly, and there is no great difference in the distribution of wealth and power. Therefore, there is almost no twists and turns in passing from one position to another; the variety of positions ensures that the work is varied, and everyone has a good life. Few of them will repeat the work that has already been done.

In this way, the city repeatedly lives an unchanging life, moving on an empty chessboard.Residents reenact the same scenes over and over, only with different actors; they speak the same lines with different accents; they open their mouths differently and yawn the same way.Of all the cities of the empire, only Eutropia remained the same.Mercury, the most revered god of impermanence in the city, performed this ambiguous miracle. The City and the Eye II Jane Lode's face depends on how you look at it.If you were whistling and walking with your head held high, then your understanding of it is from the bottom up: window sills, fluttering curtains, fountains.If you were walking with your fingernails pinching your palms and bowing your head, your eyes would only see the ground, gutters, road covers, fish scales, and waste paper.You can't say that one aspect is more real than another, but most of the legends you hear about Janerode's high place come from the memory of others, for they are sinking to Janerode's low place, Walking down the same streets every day, seeing the melancholy of the previous day embedded in the walls every morning.One day, each of us will turn our eyes to the drainpipe and never leave the paving stones again.The opposite is not impossible, but relatively rare: so we continue through the streets of Jenrod, looking into cellars, foundations, and wells.

one of city and name All that I can tell you about Aglaura is what its inhabitants often say: a series of virtues common to maxims, vices equally common to maxims, a few eccentricities, and a few prudish notions of law.Observers of old (and we have no reason to suspect them to be dishonest) believed that Aglaura had more enduring qualities than any other contemporaneous city, and from then to Perhaps none of the Aglauras have changed much, but what was once considered strange is now commonplace, what was once normal is now grotesque, and virtues and faults are no longer honorable because of a changed code of ethics. or notoriety.In this sense all the legends of Aglaora are untrue, but they have formed a solid and cohesive image of the city, while the opinions of some who are drawn at will from the mere status of the inhabitants are not. Even less substance.The result is: the legendary city has sufficient and necessary conditions for its existence, but the existence of the city we can see is not so real.

Therefore, if I describe Aglaura to you, from what I have seen and experienced, I can only tell you that it is a city without color or character, left at random.But it's also not true: at a certain moment, somewhere in the street, you saw some sign of something unmistakable, rare, perhaps brilliant: you wanted to tell it, but before All the legends about Aglaura have blocked your vocabulary, and you can only repeat other people's words but not your own. Therefore, the local residents still believe that they live in a city named Aglaora, and they cannot see the Aglaola that grows on the ground.I wish to preserve these two cities separately in my memory, but even then I can only speak of one of them, because words cannot express it, the other has disappeared.

"From now on, I will describe cities to you," Khan said, "and see if you can find them when you travel." The cities Marco Polo saw were always different from what the emperor imagined. "And what I built in my mind was a model city from which any possible city would evolve," Khubilai said. "It contains everything that conforms to the norm. Since the existing cities deviate from the norm in different degrees, I only need to recognize in advance the exceptions that do not belong to the norm, and I can calculate the closest combination to the real form."

"I have also conceived a model city from which all other cities can be derived," replied Marco Polo. "It is a city made of exceptions, exclusions, conflicts, contradictions. If such a city has the least chance, then we can improve its chances of existence by reducing the number of its constituents. Therefore, as long as we start from I remove some exceptions in my model, and no matter what direction I go, I can reach a city that exists as an exception. However, such activities cannot exceed a certain limit: otherwise the city I get will be destroyed because the chance of existence is too great. becomes impossible to be real."