The empire

He asked Marco Kublai: – You who explore around and see the signs, will you be able to tell me towards which future the favorable winds push us.
– For these ports I would not be able to trace the route on paper or fix the landing date. Sometimes all I need is a glimpse that opens up in the middle of an incongruous landscape, the emergence of lights in the fog, the dialogue of two passers-by who meet in the comings and goings, to think that from there I will put together the perfect city piece by piece. , made of fragments mixed with the rest, of moments separated by intervals, of signals that one sends and doesn't know who collects them. If I tell you that the city my journey aims at is discontinuous in space and time, now sparser, now denser, you must not believe that we can stop looking for it. Perhaps it is surfacing scatteredly within the borders of your empire as we speak; you can track her down, but in the way I told you.

(I. Calvino, Invisible cities)