with cities, it is as with dreams

bright lights / big city: a love letter to cityscapes and the urban form

Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino is a literary monument to cities. Invisible Cities was the last piece of literature I read in English class before graduating from high school. Calvino’s vivid love letter to cities in all their iterations captured the goodbye I said to my hometown city of New York as I left for a new city—Cambridge. My love for Calvino’s work is rooted in its sentimentality, but also originates in its effortless universality.

My favorite of the invisible cities is Chloe:

In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the streets are all strangers. At each encounter, they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping.

There is a quality that is unmistakably New York simmering underneath Calvino’s description: for that, it is truly beautiful. The greatest strength of Invisible Cities is its intersectionality. One city could just as easily be another city. Just as the cities are themselves, Calvino’s descriptions are eternal and fluid.