Chris

“Yes, each city has its invisible city, as Italo Calvino suggests in his great story of that name. Calvino’s story is itself cleverly nested within tellings of tellings, stories of stories, so that the text possesses multiple versions of itself. In what is to me the most memorable section, the narrator describes the impossible city of Eusapia, in which inhabitants of the living city are accompanied by ‘an identical copy of their city, underground’, a ‘Eusapia of the dead’ which can be accessed only by a confraternity of hooded brothers – though over time the symmetry between upper and lower cities becomes so acute that ‘in the twin cities there is no longer any way of knowing who is alive and who is dead.”
― Robert Macfarlane, Underland: A Deep Time Journey

“So many stories were told about him: that he had held important positions—grand dignitary of the sultan, hydraulic engineer to the diwan, or others like that”
― Italo Calvino, The Baron In The Trees

“She kept her silence and pictured the faces of her daughter and grandsons, the atheist’s prayer.”
― Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind

“the end of summer city: the shimmer of heat, the drip from window units overhead, the chorus of ice cream trucks, office buildings leaking air-conditioning onto the humid sidewalks where fat tourists were wandering dumbstruck.”
― Rumaan Alam, Leave the World Behind