CITIES & THE SKY 5
Andria was built so artfully that its every street follows a planet's orbit, and
the buildings and the places of community life repeat the order of the
constellations and the position of the most luminous stars: Antares, Alpheratz,
Capricorn, the Cepheids. The city's calendar is so regulated that jobs and offices
and ceremonies are arranged in a map corresponding to the firmament on that date:
and thus the days on earth and the nights in the sky reflect each other.
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. In praising Andria's citizens for their productive
industry and their spiritual ease, I was led to say: I can well understand how
you, feeling yourselves part of an unchanging heaven, cogs in a meticulous
clockwork, take care not to make the slightest change in your city and your
habits. Andria is the only city I know where it is best to remain motionless in
time.
They looked at one another dumbfounded. 'But why? Whoever said such a
thing?' And they led me to visit a suspended street recently opened over a bamboo
grove, a shadow-theatre under construction in the place of the municipal kennels,
now moved to the pavilions of the former lazaretto, abolished when the last plague
victims were cured, and--just inaugurated--a river port, a statue of Thales, a
toboggan slide.
'And these innovations do not disturb your city's astral rhythm?' I asked.
'Our city and the sky correspond so perfectly,' they answered, 'that any
change in Andria involves some novelty among the stars.' The astronomers, after
each change takes place in Andria, peer into their telescopes and report a nova's
explosion, or a remote point in the firmament's change of colour from orange to
yellow, the expansion of a nebula, the bending of a spiral of the Milky Way. Each
change implies a sequence of other changes, in Andria as among the stars: the city
and the sky never remain the same.
As for the character of Andria's inhabitants, two virtues are worth
mentioning: self-confidence and prudence. 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.CITIES & MEMORY 1
Diomira
Leaving there and proceeding for three days towards the east, you reach Diomira, a
city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of all the gods, streets paved with
lead, a crystal theatre, a golden cock that crows each morning on a tower. All
these beauties will already be familiar to the visitor, who has seen them also in
other cities. But the special quality of this city for the man who arrives there
on a September evening, when the days are growing shorter and the multicoloured
lamps are lighted all at once at the doors of the food stalls and from a terrace a
woman's voice cries ooh!, is that he feels envy towards those who now believe they
have once before lived an evening identical to this and who think they were happy,
that time.
CITIES & DESIRE 1
Dorothea
There are two ways of describing the city of Dorothea: you can say that four
aluminium towers rise from its walls flanking seven gates with spring-operated
drawbridges that span the moat whose water feeds four green canals which cross the
city, dividing it into nine quarters, each with three hundred houses and seven
hundred chimneys. And bearing in mind that the nubile girls of each quarter marry
youths of other quarters and their parents exchange the goods that each family
holds in monopoly--bergamot, sturgeon roe, astrolabes, amethysts--you can then
work from these facts until you learn everything you wish about the city in the
past, present, and future. Or else you can say, like the camel-driver who took me
there: 'I arrived here in my first youth, one morning, many people were hurrying
along the streets towards the market, the women had fine teeth and looked you
straight in the eye, three soldiers on a platform played the trumpet, and all
around wheels turned and coloured banners fluttered in the wind. Before then I had
known only the desert and the caravan routes. In the years that followed, my eyes
returned to contemplate the desert expanses and the caravan routes; but now I know
this path is only one of the many that opened before me on that morning in
Dorothea.'
