Polo Attacked

"Memory's images, once they are fixed in words, are erased." (Page 87) Marco says this phrase after Kublai Khan discovers that all the cities that Marco Polo describes to him come from his memories of Venice. That Marco thinks of Venice as a starting point and on from there he imagines the rest of the city. When Marco is describing Adelma, that to me sounds like if he were to describe heaven or the place that you go when you die, he states: "You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask." (Page 95) He is saying that he only sees dead people in the people he sees. he sees his grandmother, his dad, only people that are dead. Then he says, "Perhaps Adelma is the city were you arrive dying and where each finds again the people he has known. This means I, too, am dead. This means the beyond is not happy." (Page 95) So there he says that either he is in his memory thinking about the people he has known and comparing them to the people that he sees, or he is dead. I chose to believe that he is describing "heaven". In a way, unhappy heaven. He is dead and he can't rest in peace, he just sees the people he knew that are dead once again. Meaning that he is dead or he is dead in a dream. The part that made me think the most was when he said that the beyond is therefore not happy. That gets me thinking. Is there something after life? Do we truly "rest in peace?" Or do we just go back to our memory and dreams and recreate our own world with the people that we used to know? That, one will never know until he or she is dead so I prefer just not to think about it. Honestly, I don't want to be dead haha. Maybe in the end Marco became an emblem among emblems.

"... So the yours is truly a journey through memory!" (Page 98) In a way the Khan is right. It was all based on memory, I thought that was established a long time ago in the book. Everything we do and think are based on memories. Our desires and dreams are based on memories. Therefore the cities had to be based on memories and imagination, memories transformed and recreate by the mind. Then Marco things to himself that in the end of the journey one would find the jam of pat, present, future that blocks existences calcified in the illusion of movement. So in the end you would just find a revolt of thoughts, concluding that the past, present and future affect in different ways; or as I like to say it, nothing. You would find nothing. You cannot do anything about fate and about the fact that past, present and future all affect and indirectly relate to each other. So just go in the journey of life, in which you will find nothing, you will just become an emblem among emblems.