The City of Raissa

In Italo Calvino's "Invisible Cities," he describes the imaginary city of Raissa, where "life is not happy. People wring their hands as they walk the streets, curse the crying children, lean on the railings over the river and press their fists to their temples." And yet, he adds, "at every moment there is a child in a window who laughs seeing a dog that has jumped on a shed to bite into a piece of polenta dropped by a stonemason who has shouted from the top of a scaffolding, 'Darling, let me dip into it,' to a young serving-maid" and the sentence goes on from there. Threads of happiness stretch from one person to another, he says, even in this unhappy city. The exact way that he puts it: "at every second the unhappy city contains a happy city unaware of its own existence."

This reminds me of a certain afternoon in Verona, Italy (not an unhappy city as far as I could tell) where I saw three girls running around in the piazza, chasing each other, laughing up a storm, then stopping abruptly to catch their breath on a bench, and striking up a conversation with the old lady who was sitting there, though they obviously didn't know her. Something about that scene, the smiling old lady and the exuberant, respectful young girls, made me feel that life in the United States was so miserable in comparison--even if I'm over-romanticizing my entire encounter with Italy, that one moment with the girls and the old woman still resonates for me, as a prime example of how a society should organize itself--and how people should intermingle--all generations, all walks of life, freely and without hesitation.

It also reminds me of my daily encounters with "the lost," in San Francisco--which is really, a search for these missing threads of happiness. I'll try to explain that more in some subsequent post. Right now I'm craving about fifteen minutes with a good book before going to bed.