Existentialism and the Relevance of Time: Invisible Cities, by Italo Calvino, Chapters I-III

Invisible Cities is a book about the conceptualization of desires and the role of perceptions in determining human thought and opinion. Due to its independent, random, and detached character, the text can be easily associated to the staccato of scenes in the film Waking Life. Both of these works treat with a separate aspect of existentialism, whether it be human lives themselves or the manifestation of the self in the place one inhabits. An aspect that caught my attention in both Waking Life and Invisible Cities is the importance that is attributed to time. For one part, every moment is relevant in determining the course of one’s life and the pattern of existence as a whole. “To say yes to one instant is to say yes to all of existence.” (Waking Life). As Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” says, it is the paths each individual decides to take what makes “all the difference” in the future course of events. Existence can be considered as a sole unit in the sense that every one of its components, experiences, can be regarded as equally necessary in the regulation of one’s present reality. This can be compared to the city of Zoe in Invisible Cities:
“The traveler roams all around and has nothing but doubts: he is unable to distinguish the features of the city, the features he keeps distinct in his mind also mingle. He infers this: if existence in all of its moments is all of itself, Zoe is the place of indivisible existence.” (Calvino, p. 34).
When considered from a figurative sense, the merging and fusing of the elements that compose the city of Zoe can be considered as the separate yet equally significant components of existence itself. A city, or the materialization of human life and thought, brings forth everything and everyone that has contributed to the formation of individual lives. Each unit intermingles and joins with all the rest in order to give way to a massive, intricate, and abstract reality. The features are indistinct because of the synthesis it has undergone; thus, one can infer that existence “is all of itself.” In other words, the separate instances contribute to the formation of the present as we know it. Every moment can be regarded as an entire existence because each event brings forth a series of chain reactions that have taken place in order to produce an “indivisible existence” such as Zoe. The relevance of time is perfectly clear when considering life’s perpetual and incessant transformations; consequently, it is able to encompass the complexity of the past and the variations of the present.

The distorted and somewhat surreal digital clock that appears in Waking Life conceals a double meaning that may lead to the debunking of my thesis; however, it is the irrelevance the film places on the scientific approach to life what highlights the importance of moments rather than measured time itself. Even though the passage of time cannot be accurately calculated, the existentialist experiences that the main character undergoes remain intact. Time is not halted but rather altered. The significance of instants and experiences overwhelm the human urge to control the universe. Science is replaced by the weight an existentialist point of view places in the individual actions that take place throughout the course of our lives and that continually characterize our realities.

Italo Calvino proceeds to incorporate the future as an equally important unit of existence by associating it with a discarded possibility from the past. He talks about how another person’s present could have been a part of our own lives if only we had chosen another path or done something different. (Calvino, p. 29). “Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches… ‘Elsewhere is a negative mirror. The traveler recognizes the little that is his, discovering the much he has not had and will never have.” (Calvino, 29). Marco Polo’s reply to this matter highlights the paradoxical importance non-action has when determining the course of events that will unfold later on in our lives. The contending elements of space, being and non-being, are equally significant when discussing our present. Our negative mirror, or everything that does not make part of ourselves, is barred from our reality and therefore excluded from existence itself. Each person’s reality encompasses everything that is, was, or simply never existed. We live life making the decisions that we think will determine our future, unaware of the fact that everything which is never carried out is equally important as the actions we commit.