The Tao of Travel

But as a set of imaginary journeys to strange cities, it is vastly enjoyable—and it must be enjoyed rather than analyzed or probed, or it will fall apart. The cities have themes—the cities representing memory, desire, signs, eyes; thin cities, trading cities, hidden cities; cities and the dead; continuous cities. Though the book is short, the 164 chapters keep repeating the cities' themes, with variations. Much could be made of the fact that all the cities, more than fifty of them, have women's names—Dorothea, Zenobia, Sophronia, Trude, and so forth. And perhaps these names stand for the siren song that the traveler hears, the romance of far-off places.

The wise observations, travelers' truths, relieve the repetitious narrative: "The more one lost in unfamiliar quarters of distant cities, the more one understood the other cities he had crossed to arrive there; and he retraced the stages of his journeys, and he came to know the port from which he had set sail, and the familiar places of his youth." Another: "Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had: the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places." This is ingenious and strikes me as true.

In another city, Adelma, Marco sees a vegetable vendor and recognizes his grandmother, and thinks: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask." That is an accurate expression of the traveler's imagination, and a polite way of illustrating Sir Richard Burton in Arabia seeing Maula Ali, "a burly savage, in whom I detected a ridiculous resemblance to the Rev. Charles Delafosse, an old and well-remembered schoolmaster."

It is misleading, I think, to look for echoes of Borges in Calvino's work. Borges creates new worlds, yet many of Calvino's cities, for all their exoticism, seem quite familiar. Here is the city of Chloe: "In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversation, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping." How is this city different from Chicago or Paris?

Other cities are purely satirical—cities where fashion is an obsession; cities that do not begin or end ("Only the name of the airport changes"); cities where memories are traded.

What does it add up to? Certainly it is a critique of travelers' tales and reminiscences about cities, litanies that are no more than variations on a theme. And perhaps these cities, apparently hermetic and separate and far-flung, are the same city, observed or remembered according to a particular mood.

The book—seeming more of a puzzle than it actually is—also tells us a great deal about how we live in cities, how we adapt to new cities, how even the most terrifying cities can be habitable. My own feeling (and it seems to be Calvino's too) is that city dwellers invent the cities they live in. The great cities are just too big to be comprehended as a whole, so they are invisible, or imaginary, existing mainly in the mind. A New Yorker lives in his or her version of New York, creating a city that is familiar and unthreatening, not the enormous, multilayered, and towering place but a particular set of friends, houses, shops, restaurants, theaters, and, crucially, a complex network of routes—streets, trains, and neighborhoods that are safe and supportive. In his book of apparently extravagant fables, Calvino shows us how we accommodate ourselves to the real world.

Jan Morris: Last Letters from Hav

HAVING TAKEN NUMEROUS journeys across the world—one of the most widely traveled of living writers—Jan Morris invented a country, gave it a history, art, religion, and literature, and was so scrupulous in her details that people earnestly asked her afterward where exactly it was and how they might visit.

The imaginary country of Hav seems to be in the eastern Mediterranean, and has not only a highly diverse population of Muslims and Christians, but also an ancient indigenous population, of troglodytes possibly of Celtic origin, who named Hav, their word (and the Welsh word) for summer. The troglodytes are called the Kretev, "thought to be etymologically related to the Welsh crwydwyr, wanderers."

One of the annual festivals is the Roof Race, where contestants leap from roof to roof across Hav.