Invisible stories

I've been reading Invisible Cities, sort of a novel-poem by Italo Calvino. The premise of the whole story, not to give too much away, is that Marco Polo goes on journeys to fantastical cities, then returns to his lord Kublai Khan to describe what he saw. A friend of mind recommended it to me when she heard about Lover's Lanes, since they're both travelogues and anthologies of sorts.

Marco Polo's emphasis in his storytelling is usually on the city -- the civilization -- first, and only after that on what sorts of people live there. Lover's Lanes is not like that. I hope my correspondents' stories shed light on the places they live -- but I intend to tell the story of the jilted young actor set against the backdrop of Hollywood, not the story of Hollywood as manifested through the jilted young actor. I'm not worldly enough for the latter; I can't presume to know Hollywood from the few interviews I conduct there. I am provincial, and so my storytelling will also be provincial, though I hope it will be universal at the same time.

Still, there were passages of Invisible Cities -- which is a fantastic book, by the way -- that did speak very directly to my own journey. Here is an excerpt from the story of Euphemia, a rich merchant city. People who enter and leave Euphemia do so to trade ginger for poppy, nutmeg for muslin. But they trade something else, too.

You do not come to Euphemia only to buy and sell, but also because at night, by the fires all around the market, seated on sacks or barrels or stretched out on piles of carpets, at each word that one man says -- such as "wolf," "sister," "hidden treasure," "battle," "scabies," "lovers" -- the others tell, each one, his tale of wolves, sisters, treasures, scabies, lovers, battles. And you know that in the long journey ahead of you, when to keep awake against the camel's swaying or the junk's rocking, you start summoning up your memories one by one, your wolf will have become another wolf, your sister a different sister, your battle other battles, on your return from Euphemia, the city where memory is traded at every solstice and every equinox.