Invisible Cities

On my last trip to the bilingual city I once called my Montreal, I got one of the red-eyes so I could arrive in the morning and surprise my parents at home. Plus, as always, I can't sleep before leaving on a trip, so I thought I might as well use that time to roll in the miles instead of fidgeting around the house as I always do before.
Anywho... on the way there, I got to fly over the country at night...the cities look so beautiful at night, I took a few pictures, but it was very hard to take a good picture with my camera, something about the shutter speed setting and flying at 1000k/hour...

The cities looked so beautiful in their nightlight, you can almost make out shapes and patterns, but you can’t have any sense of which city it is…it’s almost magical. It made me think of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, where Marco Polo describes to Kublai Khan the wondrous cities of his empire the MP recently visited. The book is told in short vignettes with each chapter describing one detail or a characteristic of a particular city. What we get is not a surveyors description of a city, or much less a travel guides’, but it impressions of a place - a memory, that fleeting sense of the past...it's a very personal telling of Marco Polo's Journeys after having left his beloved home of Venice told to a man who has left his beloved village to conquer the world.

They see the world in very different ways, one sees it full of possibilities and wonders, while the other sees them all filled with loss and nostalgia. In the end it turns out that Marco Polo is describing only one city to the Khan - Venice. He is only thinking of his city as he wonders the world searching for his sense of home, describing it to the man who doesn’t relate to his sense of loss...


Going back home was an amazing experience.

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