Invisible Cities

To see what words have to do with cities, see Italo Calvino's "Cities & Signs 5" in Invisible Cities. It's the kind of thing I'd be tempted to raid for an epgraph.  Then I'd suppose it was too familiar. Sooner or later I'd quote the last sentence: Falsehood is never in words; it is in things while attempting to convey a dynamic of my Hillsdale book (as I call it) or of any writing any of us do.
I've dug this book before for the pleasures of its imagination, by which I mean leaps, bounds, unbounds, out-of-bounds joy at where you've found yourself, high limbs of some pine, craning your neck to see Bow Falls past the other pines. In Calvino it's so elegant, funny. (I was tempted again, this time to posit the existence of a particularly European orientation toward one's readers, but I doubt there is one.)
I've long found the notion of invisible cities useful. Right now, for instance--just got this idea--I could reveal the cities in the ravine, cities in view. No doubt the open-air 6th-floor lounge at Lloyd Hall (here at the Banff Centre) would fill the sky with cities.
I just drank from one.