Astronomy is a cursed science. In some ways it seems that we’re programmed to send out our stories and spirits to live among the stars. It allows us to look up at their cold strange data and tease out meaning. But to look long enough is to understand that the realities of our own world must extend out to furthest reaches of the sky. To observe the stars for long enough is to understand that they are poisoned by their own slow thermodynamic mortality. As a result, our vision of the world is like doomed knuckle bones, thrown with the knowledge that the only real prediction that can be validated in the long term is that of decay.

The Great Khan (Kublai Khan for those who haven’t been obsessively reading Wikipedia pages like me lately) may not have been the first to read the metaphor the night sky into his own slowly rotting empire, but Calvino has made his twin musings with Marco Polo in this book into one of the most poetic meditations on the purpose of persisting in the face of entropy.

I find it funny that on reflection I have trouble recalling the individual cities described in each…chapter?…vignette?…prose poem? of this book. I read through it twice back-to-back because I wanted to retain more of the beautiful cavalcade. But of course the point isn’t to clench the fish line network of this empire perfectly in your hand. We’ll never perfectly understand or exist in this network or even in that of a single city. We’ll never grasp all the relations and brief meanings that seem to come to us in our experience of a city. To do so is to become the city’s past, a plaque on a forgotten statue in a square.

That means that the city is the self. Its differences from other cities are the differences with the other cities that we’ve visited. And we’re exposed to Calvino’s graph of cities here. His memory and his emotions become geography and architecture. His city is a menagerie of perfect words. A Parisian wrought iron vivarium that walks us through a dreamscape. Leprosarium. Dirigible. Ephebe. Cornice. Chyrosoprase. Chalcedony. Calcareous. Odalisque. Balustrade. Arabesque. Bituminous. Lazaretto. If you’re like me maybe you recognize some of your own fleeting fascinations among the fauna of his life.

Ultimately Calvino feels that cities are dual things. They mirror themselves outwardly and inwardly, extending infinitely or infinitesimally. They contain much more than is apparent at first and to inscribe predictability or meaning to them is a beautiful foolish errand. But it’s one that we can’t help but to endeavor. Cities are our lights in the blackened night sky. To focus on the rotting cosmic background noise is peril. To quantify the light vs the dark is to forget that the light exists. Luckily our very nature draws us to focus on the light and draw it into communion with our lives.

“Yes the empire is sick, and, what is worse, it is trying to become accustomed to its sores. This is the aim of my explorations: examining the traces of happiness still to be glimpsed, I gauge its short supply. If you want to know how much darkness there is around you, you must sharpen your eyes, peering at the faint lights in the distance.”