Last week I stood on a sea wall made from volcanic rock, and watched a kid slip a fish from a tide pool with his hand. It was big and flat and blue and yellow. When he set it back into the tide pool it swam about its way, nibbling and waiting (if a fish can anticipate enough to wait) for the tide to return it to the ocean. It was, I guess, exposed in some ways—to my eyes, to birds, to the sun, to the whims of a kid by the tide pool—and sheltered in others: from predatory fish, from the wild sea.

Even if I’m calling it a vacation, time away from my usual environment often unsettles, at first. ‘Getting away’ from everyday stresses also removes me from everyday defenses: from the waterworks and plumbing of life. It seems to be a common feature of human bodies and human minds, that we don’t realize the full load we are bearing until either the load itself, or more often some compensatory mechanism, goes away. Especially a compensatory mechanism we didn’t realize was there! I think a lot about the forgotten hundred-year-old drain pump that was found chugging away beneath a section of the New York subway system that remained oddly dry during Hurricane Sandy.

After a few days though—in the water, mostly—I start to be able to move in directions I’d forgotten.

But it’s still nice to be back home with my library. Two days ago, jet-lagged, sore from a long day’s shoveling, I stayed up late flitting from book to book, any genre, any format, and stumbled upon a passage from the end of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities so excellent I had to copy it out in my journal. I’d read the book in a hallucinatory rush for the first time in the deep Pandemic and while my vibes- and structure-recall is very good for books read during that period my exact textual memory is hazier than usual; the book’s final pages struck me with the force of something read for the first time. All you need for context, here, is the book’s general shape: it’s a series of descriptions of fanciful cities, related by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan, cities with towers so high the moon rests there at night in its journey across the sky, cities hung on webs woven across a great chasm. There is no external dramatic narrative, though there is a slow graceful shape to the periodic framing conversations between the Khan and Polo on the nature of cities, travel, people, and time, which culminate in this passage:

The Great Khan’s atlas contains also the maps of the promised lands visited in thought but not yet discovered or founded: New Atlantis, Utopia, the City of the Sun, Oceana, Tanoë, New Lanark, Icaria.

Kublai asked Marco: “You, who go about exploring and who see signs, can tell me toward which of these futures the favoring winds are driving us.”

“For these ports, I could not draw a route on the map or set a date for the landing. At times, all I need is a brief glimpse, an opening in the midst of an incongruous landscape, a glint of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passersby meeting in the crowd, and I think that, setting out from there, I will put together, piece by piece, the perfect city, made of fragments mixed with the rest, of instants separated by intervals, of signals one sends out, not knowing who receives them. If I tell you that the city toward which my journey tends is discontinuous in space and time, now scattered, now more condensed, you must not believe the search for it can stop. Perhaps while we speak, it is rising, scattered, within the confines of your empire; you can hunt for it, but only in the way I have said.”

Already the Great Khan was leafing through his atlas, over the maps of the cities that menace in nightmares and maledictions: Enoch, Babylon, Yahooland, Butua, Brave New World.

He said: “It is all useless, if the last landing place can only be the infernal city, and it is there that, in ever-narrowing circles, the current is drawing us.”

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

Take care of one another, friends. Work for the liberation of all sentient beings.