ASSIGNMENT 2

INVISIBLE CITIES
Shubham Kumar
170BARCHI107

The amazing Kublai Khan sits in his lawn, sensing the stop of his empire. He sends for information
from his distant holdings and is answered with the aid of Marco Polo. As Polo weaves story after tale
of the towns he has visited in Khan's call, it's far not possible to tell if the cities certainly exist or if
they have been produced from Polo's creativeness. Polo tells of buying and selling towns, hidden
towns, cities and the lifeless, and cities and the sky. By the end it will become clear that each of the
wondrous places is the identical metropolis. Even though Invisible Cities is a brief novel, it presents
volumes of facts so that it will live with the reader for years after she or he has put it away. Khan
does now not necessarily accept as true with what Polo tells him of the remote cities. He is however,
entranced by means of the testimonies. The conversations among Polo and Khan offer a framework
for the specific stories that Polo tells. The tales are in essence reviews at the towns inside the
empire. The difference is that those aren't popular reviews. Polo weaves poetry into his prose and
presents a one-of-a-kind manner of looking at the cities. He offers the cities existence and actually
describes them as beings. Many times he's going to confer with a city as though it were a female.
The reader sees that there may be an information among the 2 guys, even when they do no longer
speak the identical language. They can sit together in silence and imagine what the other will say in
response to a question. Khan is worried that his empire is crumbling or that it is so giant that it will
crumble below its personal weight. Polo tries to get Khan to look the empire as whole with the aid of
describing certain small components. Polo tends to weave his memories around the emperor's
moods. If the emperor is indignant, Polo attempts to appease him. If the emperor is in good spirits,
Polo warns him being too confident. Polo picks dominant characteristics of each metropolis whether
it's miles its architecture, humans, or location and then tells his story with that characteristic as its
recognition. The language Polo uses is evocative, poetic, and existential. His descriptions and
conversations with Khan emerge as increasingly more surreal as his tales pass on. The reader sees
that Polo is layering his descriptions on top of each different. He is building closer to something. The
reader by no means really learns the purpose of the stories. He or she is in reality too entranced
within the beauty of the language and surreal nature of the descriptions. In all, Polo describes fifty-
five different cities. Each city is precise whilst being very just like the others. Polo imbues each town
with his own perceptions and asks the emperor to do the same. He says that due to the fact they
may be sitting within the lawn taking part in a nice breeze, the emperor will understand a
description of a metropolis wherein he sat outside and enjoyed a pleasing breeze. He is seeking to
vicinity them each in a particular time and location. In this manner he can make the city come to
existence for the emperor, despite the fact that the city does no longer exist.

The city of Leonia refashions itself each day: each morning the people wake among clean sheets,
wash with simply-unwrapped cakes of soap, put on brand-new apparel, take from the modern-day
version refrigerator still unopened tins, being attentive to the final-minute jingles from the most
updated radio. On the sidewalks, encased in spotless plastic luggage, the stays of the previous day's
Leonia look ahead to the garbage truck. Not simplest squeezed tubes of toothpaste, blown-out light
bulbs, newspapers, containers, wrappings, however also boilers, encyclopaedias, pianos, porcelain
dinner services. It is not so much by means of the things that each day are synthetic, offered, sold
that you may measure Leonia's opulence, however alternatively by way of the matters that every
day are thrown out to make room for the new. So you start to wonder if Leonia's genuine ardour is
actually, as they are saying, the entertainment of new and various things, and not, alternatively, the
pleasure of expelling, discarding, cleaning itself of a recurrent impurity. The reality is that avenue
cleaners are welcomed like angels, and their task of eliminating the residue of the previous day's
existence is surrounded by a respectful silence, like a ritual that conjures up devotion, perhaps best
because as soon as matters were remove no one wants to should think about them in addition.
Nobody wonders in which, every day, they create their load of refuse. Outside the town, actually;
but every 12 months the metropolis expands, and the street cleaners must fall farther again. The
bulk of the outflow will increase and the piles upward thrust better, become stratified, expand over
a much wider perimeter. Besides, the more Leonia's skills for making new materials excels, the
greater the rubbish improves in great, resists time, the elements, fermentations, combustions. A fort
of everlasting leftovers surrounds Leonia, dominating it on every side, like a chain of mountains. This
is the result: the more Leonia expels goods, the extra it accumulates them; the scales of its past are
soldered right into a cuirass that can't be removed. As the metropolis is renewed each day, it
preserves all of itself in its handiest definitive form: the day gone by sweepings piled up on the
sweepings of the day earlier than the day gone by and of all its days and years and decades. Leonia's
rubbish grade by grade might invade the arena, if, from beyond the final crest of its boundless
garbage heap, the road cleaners of other towns were no longer urgent, also pushing mountains of
refuse in the front of themselves. Perhaps the whole global, beyond Leonia's boundaries, is
protected with the aid of craters of garbage, each surrounding a metropolis in regular eruption. The
obstacles between the alien, adversarial towns are inflamed ramparts in which the detritus of both
assist every other, overlap, mingle. The greater its top grows, the more the chance of a landslide
looms: a tin can, an antique tire, an unravelled wine flask, if it rolls closer to Leonia, is sufficient to
deliver with it an avalanche of unmated footwear, calendars of bygone years, withered vegetation,
submerging the town in its personal beyond, which it had tried in vain to reject, mingling with the
past of the neighbouring towns, finally clean. A cataclysm will flatten the sordid mountain range,
cancelling each hint of the metropolis continually dressed in new garments. In the close by cities
they're all prepared, waiting with bulldozers to flatten the terrain, to push into the new territory,
amplify, and drive the brand new avenue cleaners still farther out.