Invisible Ideas

In a previous blog post, "Journeys of Our Minds," I  said that, up to the first few chapters of the book, Marco Polo was actually talking about knowledge. I believe I was mostly right as further in the book his ideas about cities become increasingly related to perception, imagination, our minds, or things that relate to knowledge. It's still hard for me to put all of the author's ideas together and understand them as a whole, but Calvino's philosophical ideas are hinted throughout the novel, either through the conversations in the interludes or the descriptions of cities.

The way we see things, or our perception, is an explored idea throughout the book. Calvino uses the sections under Cities and Signs when representing perception and understanding, but in other parts of the book similar ideas are mentioned as well. Marco Polo speaks about the cities in an imaginative way. He doesn't describe factual things about the cities, but rather gives abstract ideas about them. The young Venetian allows Kublai Khan to have a different interpretation of what he says, he opens his ideas to different perceptions. As Calvino shows in the interludes, through metaliterary elements, Marco Polo's relationship with the Khan, or the author's relationship with the reader, depends on interpretation. The reader questions Calvino's book and, as we spoke about in class, Calvino might as well been dead for a long time as our only connection with him is what he wrote. The cities have shown how languages are abstract, and communication can be about things and not ideas, or how our memories are based on simplifications of occurrences. One could say that the book shows how people's perception of things is abstract and undefinable.
In chapter 3 Calvino says, "Cities also believe they are the work of the mind or of chance, but neither the one nor the other suffices to hold up their walls. You take delight not in a city's seven or seventy wonders, but in the answer it gives to a question of yours" (pg. 44). I believe this quote sums up many of the things Calvino is trying to represent throughout the book. Material things don't necessarily help you, but the thoughts that they can bring upon your mind, like when the cities allowed Marco Polo to reflect on his life, do make a difference. Our mind, and what we do with it, make up reality.