In his atlas, Kublai Khan wants to record every city in his empire—and in the world—so that he can figure out how to get there and ultimately, how to (or if he can) conquer them. The atlas (and Kublai Khan’s devotion to it) symbolizes the human tendency to try to categorize and understand everything, even when that effort is clearly a losing battle. Marco Polo insists that while he can name and describe all the cities, real and imagined, in the atlas, it’s impossible to conquer all of them. With this, he suggests that trying to make everything fit into a certain system, such as an atlas, is ultimately futile. More important than whether someone can name cities or plan journeys, the novel suggests, is how a person looks at their world.
The Atlas Quotes in Invisible Cities
And Polo answers, “Traveling, you realize that differences are lost: each city takes to resembling all cities, places exchange their form, order, distances, a shapeless dust cloud invades the continents. Your atlas preserves the differences intact: that assortment of qualities which are like the letters in a name.”
“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.”
The Atlas Symbol Timeline in Invisible Cities
