Physical cities in the physical world are woven from stone, brick, asphalt, and concrete. Their populations are counted, their streets mapped, and their borders drawn. When we give an address, we can explain where we are. Yet the cities within which a person lives have neither an address nor a map to point them out. These cities consist solely of streets known only to us, lost squares, houses that were never built, and memories suspended somewhere in time.
Italo Calvino brings us to the threshold of precisely such a world in his work Invisible Cities. The cities Marco Polo recounts to Kublai Khan are not merely imaginary settlements in distant geographies. Each is a separate mental universe carrying man's desires, fears, memories, and his way of perceiving the world. In these cities, we sometimes find the longing of a person, sometimes the collapse of a civilization, and sometimes the quest of a soul that fits nowhere.
Perhaps this is why Calvino's cities do not feel entirely foreign to us. For a person does not live solely in the house they were born in, the neighborhood they inhabit, or the countries they travel to throughout their life. They also lead a life within their mind. They build their own city with the nostalgia of the past, the memory of forgotten faces, streets never visited but longed for, and futures once believed to be possible. Suddenly, a single scent, a song we haven't heard for years, or a familiar voice heard on a crowded street opens the door to that city. For a moment, we drift away from where we are and begin walking down the most familiar streets of our minds.
Moreover, time in these cities does not progress as it does in the outer world. In real life, years pass, buildings are demolished, trees are cut down, and streets change. Our childhood home is sold to someone else, the shop we passed by every day closes, and the square that once looked huge to us shrinks. Yet the city in our mind maintains a life independent of all these changes. A remembered summer afternoon, a table where a person we lost years ago sat, or a house we will never return to can still stand within us with all their original light.
Yet memory is not a flawless archive preserving the past exactly as it was. Over time, it alters what we recall, erasing some details and magnifying others. When we think of our childhood street, perhaps we miss not the street itself, but who we were on that street. We search not for the view from a window, but for the security we felt while looking at it. This is why the cities in our minds are not copies of the real world. They are places where what we experienced blends with what we felt, reconstructed over time.
However, invisible cities are not merely composed of the past. Some harbor lives we never lived. An old town we read about in a book, a coastline we saw in a photograph, or a small house we built in our minds can sometimes feel more familiar to us than the place we inhabit. We can long for a country we have never visited, or feel a closeness to the life of a person we have never known. Because to long for something, one does not always need to have lost it. A person can also mourn a life they never possessed.
Perhaps the most crowded cities within us consist precisely of the possibilities we could not live out. We store there the kind of person we would have become had we made a different choice, the path we lacked the courage to take, and the dreams we once believed would come true but that drifted away with time. In these cities, the roads are not yet closed. Some doors can still open, some journeys can still begin. While the opportunities offered by real life are restricted, our mind never completely shuts the door to lives we might have lived differently.
For this reason, invisible cities are the places we take refuge in when we grow tired of the chaos of the outer world. They return what we have lost to us for a while, help us recognize ourselves anew, and keep alive the possibility of a peace we cannot find in real life. Yet, like every sanctuary, they have a limit. If we linger too long in a city of the past, we may fail to recognize the streets of our present life. If we idealize a future that never materialized within our minds, the life we hold in our hands may appear deficient. A person sometimes begins to live inside the city they built to protect themselves, and after a while, forgets how to leave.
Perhaps the issue is not abandoning these cities, but finding the distance between ourselves and them. Because what makes us who we are is not merely the events we lived through; the meanings we attribute to them, the memories we keep, and the possibilities we carry within us even if they never come to pass are also parts of our identity. The cities in our minds unite the traces of the past with the dreams of the future. Sometimes they bind us to where we are, and sometimes they call us toward a direction we do not yet know.
When a person is lost in the world, they search for an address. When they are lost within themselves, they sometimes need a memory, sometimes a dream, and sometimes simply a silent place where they can understand themselves. Everyone has a city inside them that they cannot show to others. Some return to their childhood in that city, some trace the footsteps of someone they lost, and some wander the streets of a life they have not yet lived.
Perhaps these cities, found on no map, are secret passages a person opens to themselves. While the outer world continues to change, time continues to flow, and life carries us from one place to another, they continue to live within us.
Because sometimes a person's home is not where they live, but the place they can return to without ceasing to be themselves.
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