There is No Language Without Deceit

We tend to live all our lives with certain images in our minds, knowing that a chair is a chair, a red light means stop, a boat docks at a harbor and a plane goes through the air. But what if someday we find a place where nothing is what it seems? What if in life or in literature, there are moments where “the eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things…” (Cities & Signs 1). This is precisely where Calvino is getting at with the sections of Cities & Signs: breaking stereotypes and clichés, telling us to look at things with “new eyes.” That’s precisely what the city of Hypatia represents. “’Signs form a language, but not the one you think you know.’ I had realized I had to free myself from the images which in the past had announced to me the things I sought: only then would I succeed in understanding the language of Hypatia.” (Cities & Signs 5). This city, and this short excerpt represent the book and life in general. This book is completely different from anything ever written, it’s unique, and so we cannot start reading it expecting to find what we’ve found in previous readings. We need to have a fresh start with this book, be prepared for anything, because if we start reading Invisible Cities expecting to find what we always do, we’d end up concluding that this book describes the weirdest cities we’ve ever heard about. We would lose in front of our own eyes the true meaning of things, just like Marco in Hypatia when he saw the blue lagoon and expected to find beautiful women and instead found corpses. “True, also in Hypatia the day will come when my only desire will be to leave. I know I must not go down to the harbor then, but climb the citadel’s highest pinnacle and wait for a ship to go by up there. But will it ever go by?” (Cities & Signs 5).  Everything is different everywhere, and we need to understand that when we are in front of something new. The colonizers of the Americas arrived here with those new eyes, they didn’t expect the people here to be drinking tea at 5, they were ready for something different. We always have to be ready for new things, which doesn’t mean letting go of everything, but just being prepared for different things so as to not lose the essence of those things, like what happened to Marco in Hypatia at first.