~*~
"The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that they can no longer see it The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space." -Invisible Cities ~*~
When I first read this paragraph I was a bit confused about what it was saying. Fires and suffering, not to mention infernos that still are not infernos and how to tell the difference. It took a few re-readings before I fully understood what this paragraph was trying to say. Calvino packs a lot of information into this one closing paragraph in order to explain the entire point of this novel. It just required me to step back and view the book as a whole in order to get some understanding of it.
Through the entire novel, Marco Polo has been telling Kublai Khan fantastic and whimsical stories about his empire and the individual cities within it. These stories about an empire that Khan believes to be decaying into ruin depict instead a flourishing empire, one that is progressing towards a better version of itself. Which one is true then? Is the empire indeed as corrupt as Kublai Khan says it is? Or perhaps Marco Polo is right, and each city he comes across is alive and thriving, even if they are not going about it in the most wholesome way. It is possible that real life examples could answer this question.
In anyone's life, whenever there is a complication, that person can only see the problem at hand. Not understanding or seeing the entire context results in the problem seeming much more important than it actually is. In his story, Calvino illustrates that life is in fact cyclical; different scenes or problems repeat themselves, but our human free will allows for change, a permutation that can completely change the course of events. Like gears working together, to remove or switch one causes the whole thing to change. To be slightly melodramatic, one small mutation has the potential to completely change the entire fabric of space and time. Marco Polo's stories serve to show thousands of small permutations that have changed each individual city (or the same city) to change in countless ways. Within his stories, time means nothing; he disregards it for the purpose of showing how the different decisions affected the structure of that city. Each different story then becomes an example of how the city could progress towards a perfect version of itself, free of the decay that Kublai Khan so fears.
But then why an inferno? Any mention of fire usually calls to mind negative mental images. Getting burned, destruction, and even ideas of Hell are tied into the visual images created by an inferno. And yet apparently this is the entire point of the book. Perhaps the inferno is the passion of the book; the obsession that makes Invisible Cities a novel. When you are caught up in an obsession, you often do not even realize that you are trapped within one. The walls of addiction and passion are often disguised, making the one trapped completely ignorant to their presence. Khan, trapped by his obsession with the decay of his empire, was unable to even look past that to see the bigger picture just as the people within the individual cities were trapped by their passions of death, beauty, dreams, and so on. Being so ensnared immediately takes away some free will, as the group of people are forced into place, like tiny gears, by human nature, and have no choice but to blindly follow the path set for them. The worst part is that, once trapped, they forget that they ever were any different, and so make no effort to change. Their lives immediately become circular, with no possibility for either change or progress. This would be the suffering of the inferno, which indeed does call to mind images of Hell; being forever fixed within the same state of being.
If this was the end of the story, it would be a very dreary novel. Instead, Calvino actually answeres the question born out of despiration; how to avoid such a fate. Each of us is within an inferno of our own. Whether of our own making, or formed by the society we live in, we are dictated by the passions that hold sway over us. However, it is said that the strongest steel is forged from the flames of Hell. Therefore, within suffering, or even (to be less dramatic) within the trudge of everyday life can be found Truths, things that illustrate meaning when things seem pointless. Through Marco Polo's discussions with Kublai Khan, Calvino shows that to avoid a predestined fate is to step back from the endless circle of life's events in order to discover the cyclical pattern that runs through it all; to find the truth wherever it can be found, whether in an empire or within individual cities, to find the one invisible city, the perfect version of all of them combined, and to follow the ever-narrowing circles that lead us to it. For it is only in stepping back that we can fully grasp the complete picture.
.jpg)
No comments:
Post a Comment