The Cities of Human Decadence

Humanity: The most achieving race, but the most obscure one. We are vicious individuals, who have created a world of our own. Everything revolves around our existence and our benefit. We expect too many things from this world, from this superficial society. These high expectations lead to our defeat when failure comes. In the world of TODAY, we do NOT accept mistakes because we have too many expectations.

"Just Society"

In Invisible Cities, Calvino depicts various cities that are all different. When analyzing the cities, one can contrast certain countries with these cities, where "invisible" societies appear. You might be asking yourself what do I mean by "invisible societies." Our mentality is simply rotten, isolated from all values and moral. We only care about our benefit, not for others' benefit. Our will to help is invisible, we only help if it benefits ourselves, which means that our intentions to help each other are just fallacies. Let's just take a look for the meaning of society in the world dictionary: "A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations." It states that society is related through "persistent relations," but how can we interpret these relations? Are they invisible or are they real? They are simply fake, which is worrying because this means we never know how a person might react to our personal difficulties. It is either our benefit our theirs, our life or theirs, this is human nature corrupted by society. The actual meaning also refers to "dominant cultural expectations." This goes back to my idea of humans expecting too much from this world of today. What are our expectations based around? fortune or progress? Here is where the two different thinkers appear, the ambitious ones and the revolutionary ones, who oppose the corruption of power and encourage prosperity for ALL.

In Invisible Cities, each city is known either for a particular emotion, a particular time, memory, or object that makes this city unique. Zaira is known for it's past, "however, it does not tell its past, but contains it like the lines of a hand, written in corners of streets, the gratings of the windows, the banisters of the steps, the antennae of the lighting rods, the poles of the flags, every segment marked in turn with scratches, indentations, scrolls." (11)
In this case, we could relate this city to a country, probably Colombia. In this country, history isn't told, but it is very evident today. In countries like Colombia, where the history is so crude and violent, this past has been tried to be forgotten, but it is just simply impossible because the past is what depicts the huge gap between the elite and the lower class today. The injustices over the lower class create a continuous resentment against the rich. This resentment is endless, it goes from generation to generation. This is the place where everyone would like to live in a more progressive country. The rich continuously critique the country because of it's violence and inactive progress. In the other hand, the poor continuously attack the rich, and as a result they form guerillas, such as Las FARC.

Zora is the vacation city, foreign to all our culture and monotonous life. It is a city where everything seems amazing to the eye of any foreign tourist. In my case, Zora for me is Machu Pichu, an amazing 15th century Inca site located in Peru. "Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets,and of doors of windows in the houses." (15) This is exactly what I think about Machu Picchu. Although I went about 8 years ago, I still remember various particular scenarios in detail. It is a site of memories, of specific memories that will never be erased from my mind.

By contrasting these two cities with particular sites, we can deduce that Calvino makes a representation of our miserable lives in society. In my case, Colombia for me is the Zaira of a barbarous past where I'm not as happy. Instead, Zora is the city of my dreams, where I wish I lived. We are never completely satisfied by living the place we were born and raised. We have other expectations, we always desire a different life from the one we actually have.