Quote:
Originally posted by ripsgreentree
Having pictures has really set me back, no one fits the mental images that I had for each of you.
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Italo Calvino - perhaps my favorite author - wrote a wonderful piece about almost precisely this emotion:
From
Invisible Cities:
For a long time Pyrrha to me was a fortified city on the slopes of a
bay, with high windows and towers, enclosed like a goblet, with a
central square deep as a well, with a well in its center. I had never
seen it. It was one of the many cities where I had never arrived, that
I conjusred up, through its name: Euphrasia, Odile, Margara,
Getullia. Pyrrha had its place among them, different from each of
them, and like each of them, unmistakable to the mind's eye.
The day came when my travels took me to Pyrrha. As soon as I set foot
there, everything I had imagined was forgotten; Pyrrha had become what
is Pyrrha; and I thought I had always known that the sea is invisible
from the city, hidden behind a dune of the low, rolling coast; that
the streets are long and straight; that the houses are clumped
together at intervals, not high, and that they are separarted by open
lots with stacks of lumber and with sawmills; that the wind stirs the
vanes of the water pumps. From that moment on the the name Pyrrha has
brought to my mind this view, this light, this buzzing, this air in
which a yellowish dust flies; obviously the name means and could mean
nothing but this.
My mind goes on containing a great number of cities I have never seen
and will never see, names that bear with them a figure or a fragment
or a glimmer of an imagined figure: Getullia, Odile, Euphrasia,
Margara. The city high above the bay is also there still, with the
square enclosing the well, but I can no longer call it by a name, nor
remember how I could ever have given it a name that means something
entirely different.