"You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living."

By now, I believe I am being able to understand Invisible Cities symbolically. However, there's no way of knowing whether what I'm doing is right or wrong. Calvino even says so himself in the dialogue between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan: "The connections between one element of the story and another were not always obvious to the emperor; the objects could ave various meanings..." (P. 38) So I have reached the conclusion that the reader's understanding of the book might be psychological, it reflects what might be going on in their head or what they think about a lot. I won't give something a meaning that I never think of in my life, I will give it something that I believe is important, something worth writing of. Because of this, readers won't have the exact same understanding of the book, everyone will get at least one thing different from the rest.

To me, each city symbolizes an aspect of humans and how they live. Aglaura, for example, is a city that represents rumors and stereotype because everybody says the same things about it even when they know it's not true. Eusapia, on the other hand, represents dependence on the past. There is upper Eusapia (with the living) and lower Eusapia (with the dead) and sometimes "there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead" (P. 110) since the living will always mirror the dead. There are many other cities (Beersheba representing greed, Irene representing complexity of people, and Laudomia representing destiny), however the one I found to be a very important reflection of our own is Leonia. This is a city wholly based on consumerism. So they throw things away everyday to make space for even more. Calvino even says "...you begin to wonder if Leonia's true passion is really, as they say, the enjoyment of new and different things, and not instead, the joy of expelling, discarding, cleansing itself of a recurring property." (P. 115) This city seems similar to Anastasia (refer to blog titled "Falsehood is never in words, it is in things."). But not only to this city, though. Isn't it exactly what happens in our world today?

I find it incredible how this is a book open to analysis. There is no single meaning, Calvino allows the reader to interpret it as he desires, and is successful. Marco Polo is supposed to be speaking a different language from the one Kublai Khan does, and since Marco Polo is Calvino in Khan is us, then we are reading in a different language. When I first started reading I found this ridiculous. "He writes in English, we read in English, not much more to it," I thought. But I was wrong; there is so much to it. It's not the words that have a different meaning, it's the symbols. And because we don't know the "language" of symbols, we have to interpret them in any way we can and do our best to understand. It's very difficult, but I believe I might be finally getting this "new language", or so I hope.