Clippings

…they are both completely still, silent … enclosed in their insensitive casing… The poverty of their sensorial stimuli perhaps drives them to a concentrated, intense mental life, leads them to a crystalline inner awareness. . . . Perhaps the eros of tortoises obeys absolute spiritual laws…

Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man’s place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one, and after long wandering he had come to be in the place of that man in that square. By now, from that real or hypothetical past of his, he is excluded; he cannot stop; he must go on to another city, where another of his pasts awaits him, or something perhaps that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else’s present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches.

“Journeys to relive your past?” was the Khan’s question at this point, a question which could also have been formulated: “Journeys to recover your future?”

And Marco’s answer was: “Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.”

Convalescent, immobilized in the nut tree, he plunged into serious study. At that time he began to write a Project for the Constitution of an Ideal State in the Trees, in which he described the imaginary Republic of Arborea, inhabited by just men. He began it as a treatise on laws and governments; but as he wrote, his impulse to invent complicated stories intervened and out poured a rough sketch of adventures, duels and erotic tales, the latter inserted in a chapter on matrimonial rights…. He sent a précis to Diderot, signing it simply: “Cosimo Rondò, Reader of the Encyclopaedia.” Diderot thanked him with a short note.

Perhaps all that is left of the world is a wasteland covered with rubbish heaps, and the hanging gardens of the Great Khan’s palace. It is our eyelids that separates them, but we cannot know which is inside and which outside.