Invisible Cities Bot

#Bot tweeting from Italo Calvino's book "Invisible Cities," an exploration of impossible cities & the people within them. Built by @ThePringularity. Fair use!

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

The Laudomia of the unborn does not transmit, like the city of the dead, any sense of security to the inhabitants of the living Laudomia: only alarm.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

In the lives of emperors there is a moment which follows pride in the boundless extension of the territories we have conquered, and the melancholy and relief of knowing we shall soon give up any thought of knowing and understanding them.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

Intent on piling up its carats of perfection, Beersheba takes for virtue what is now a grim mania to fill the empty vessel of itself...

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

For a long time Pyrrha to me was a fortified city on the slopes of a bay, with high windows and towers, enclosed like a goblet, with a central square deep as a well...

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

Like a lake with low shores lost in swamps, so Penthesilea spreads for miles around, a soupy city diluted in the plain...

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

The first to arrive could not understand what drew these people to Zobeide, this ugly city, this trap.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

The harbor faces north, in shadow. The docks are high over the black water, which slams against the retaining walls; stone steps descend, made slippery by seaweed.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

The living of Laudomia frequent the house of the unborn to interrogate them: footsteps echo beneath the hollow domes; the questions are asked in silence...

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

...the jam of past, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement: this is what you would find at the end of your journey.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

In Raissa, life is not happy.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

Only in Marco Polo's accounts was Kublai Khan able to discern, through the walls and towers destined to crumble, the tracery of a pattern so subtle it could escape the termites' gnawing.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

I entered the great library, I became lost among shelves collapsing under the vellum bindings, I followed the alphabetical order of vanished alphabets, up and down halls, stairs, bridges.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

But why, then, does the city exist? What line separates the inside from the outside, the rumble of wheels from the howl of wolves?

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

Convinced that every innovation in the city influences the sky's pattern, before taking any decision they calculate the risks and advantages for themselves and for the city and for all worlds.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

Pale buildings back to back in mangy fields, among plank fences and corrugated-iron sheds.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

Also in Raissa, city of sadness, there runs an invisible thread that binds one living being to another for a moment, then unravels...

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

Though it is painstakingly regimented, the city's life flows calmly like the motion of the celestial bodies and it acquires the inevitability of phenomena not subject to human caprice.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

Olinda is certainly not the only city that grows in concentric circles, like tree trunks which each year add one more ring.

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

And to feel sure of itself, the living Laudomia has to seek in the Laudomia of the dead the explanation of itself, even at the risk of finding more there, or less...

[Invisible Cities Bot @Bot_Cities]

Beware of saying to them that sometimes different cities follow one another on the same site and under the same name, born and dying without knowing one another, without communication among themselves.