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Date: Wed, 15 Jan 1997 01:26:37 GMTServer: NCSA/1.4.1Content-type: text/htmlLast-modified: Sat, 28 Dec 1996 18:01:43 GMTContent-length: 6192<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 3.2//EN"><HTML><HEAD> <TITLE>Extract from "Invisible Cities" by Italo Calvino</TITLE> <META NAME="GENERATOR" CONTENT="Mozilla/3.01Gold (Win95; I) [Netscape]"></HEAD><BODY TEXT="#FFFF00" BGCOLOR="#C3C3C3" LINK="#0000EF" VLINK="#55188A" ALINK="#FF0000" BACKGROUND="chessboard.gif"><P><B>From the foot of the Great Khan's throne a majolica pavement extended.Marco Polo, mute informant, spread out on it the samples of the wares hehad brought back from his journeys to the ends of the empire: a helmet,a seashell, a coconut, a fan. Arranging the objects in a certain orderon the black and white tiles, and occasionally shifting them with studiedmoves, the ambassador tried to depict for the monarch's eyes the vicissitudesof his travels, the conditions of the empire, the prerogatives of the distantprovincial seats.</B></P><P><B>Kublai was a keen chess player; following Marco's movements, he observedthat certain pieces implied or excluded the vicinity of other pieces andwere shifted along certain lines. Ignoring the objects' variety of form,he could grasp the system of arranging one with respect to the others onthe majolica floor. He thought: "If each city is like a game of chess,the day when I have learned the rules, I shall finally possess my empire,even if I shall never succeed in knowing all the cities it contains."</B></P><P><B>Actually, it was useless for Marco's speeches to employ all thisbric-a-brac: a chessboard would have sufficed, with its specific pieces.To each piece, in turn, they could give an appropriate meaning: a knightcould stand for a real horseman, or for a procession of coaches, an armyon the march, an equestrian monument; a queen could be a lady looking downfrom her balcony, a fountain, a church with a pointed dome, a quince tree.</B></P><P><B>Returning from his last mission, Marco Polo found the Khan awaitinghim, seated at a chessboard. With a gesture he invited the Venetian tosit opposite him and describe, with the help only of the chessmen, thecities he had visited. Marco did not lose heart. The Great Khan's chessmenwere huge pieces of polished ivory: arranging on the board looming rooksand sulky knights, assembling swarms of pawns, drawing straight or obliqueavenues like a queen's progress, Marco recreated the perspectives and thespaces of black and white cities on moonlit nights.</B></P><P><B>Contemplating these essential landscapes, Kublai reflected on theinvisible order that sustains cities, on the rules that decreed how theyrise, take shape and prosper, adapting themselves to the seasons, and thenhow they sadden and fall in ruins. At times he thought he was on the vergeof discovering a coherent, harmonious system underlying the infinite deformitiesand discords, but no model could stand up to comparison with the game ofchess. Perhaps, instead of racking one's brain to suggest with the ivorypieces' scant help visions which were anyway destined to oblivion, it wouldsuffice to play a game according to the rules, and to consider each successivestate of the board as one of the countless forms that the system of formsassembles and destroys.</B></P><P><B>Now Kublai Khan no longer had to send Marco Polo on distant expeditions:he kept him playing endless games of chess. Knowledge of the empire washidden in the pattern drawn by the angular shifts of the knight, by thediagonal passages opened by the bishop's incursions, by the lumbering,cautious tread of the king and the humble pawn, by the inexorable ups anddowns of every game.</B></P><P><B>The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now it was thegame's purpose that eluded him. Each game ends in a gain or a loss: butof what? What were the true stakes? At checkmate, beneath the foot of theking, knocked aside by the winner's hand, a black or a white square remains.By disembodying his conquests to reduce them to the essential, Kublai hadarrived at the extreme operation: the definitive conquest, of which theempire's multiform treasures were only illusory envelopes. It was reducedto a square of planed wood: nothingness. . . .</B></P><P><B>. . . The Great Khan tried to concentrate on the game: but now itwas the game's reason that eluded him. The end of every game is a gainor a loss: but of what? What were the real stakes? At checkmate, beneaththe foot of the king, knocked aside by the winner's hand, nothingness remains:a black square, or a white one. By disembodying his conquests to reducethem to the essential, Kublai had arrived at the extreme operation: thedefinitive conquest, of which the empire's multiform treasures were onlyillusory envelopes; it was reduced to a square of planed wood.</B></P><P><B>Then Marco Polo spoke: "Your chessboard, sire, is inlaid withtwo woods: ebony and maple. The square on which your enlightened gaze isfixed was cut from the ring of a trunk that grew in a year of drought:you see how its fibers are arranged? Here a barely hinted knot can be madeout: a bud tried to burgeon on a premature spring day, but the night'sfrost forced it to desist."</B></P><P><B>Until then the Great Khan had not realized that the foreigner knewhow to express himself fluently in his language, but it was not this fluencythat amazed him.</B></P><P><B>"Here is a thicker pore: perhaps it was a larvum's nest; nota woodworm, because, once born, it would have begun to dig, but a caterpillarthat gnawed the leaves and was the cause of the tree's being chosen forchopping down . . . This edge was scored by the wood carver with his gougeso that it would adhere to the next square, more protruding. . . ."</B></P><P><B>The quantity of things that could be read in a little piece of smoothand empty wood overwhelmed Kublai; Polo was already talking about ebonyforests, about rafts laden with logs that come down the rivers, of docks,of women at the windows. . . .</B></P><P><I>"Invisible Cities" - Italo Calvino. </I></P><P><!WA0><A HREF="http://www.cs.nyu.edu/phd_students/jermyn/index.html"><!WA1><IMG SRC="http://www.cs.nyu.edu/phd_students/jermyn/bullet_bonsai.gif" BORDER=3 HEIGHT=37 WIDTH=28></A><B>HomePage</B></P></BODY></HTML>⌨️ 快捷键说明
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