Waiting for the Robots

Extinction

I’ve been slowly reading my way through Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, which is a book of short sketches of fantastical cities told by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan. At one point, Kublai Kahn accuses Marco Polo of making the cities up and concentrating on insignificant and disappointing places, and he replies:

“While, at a sign from you, sire, the unique and final city raises its stainless walls, I am collecting the ashes of the other possible cities that vanish to make room for it, cities that can never be rebuilt or remembered. “

One of the cities: “But in vain I set out to  visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has forgotten her”

How many memories can our brains realistically store? We keep building and buiding on top of old thoughts, pulling the most signicant memories to the surface so they dont disappear in the confusion. I like to think about dinosaurs, who have long been extinct– well before recorded history, and yet we have created stories and memorials to them. Their bodies have been reassembled– and they’ve been recreated into something that everyone believes existed- even though we’ve never had any personal interaction with them- no people have. It makes me think about how changable and subjective the past is– we don’t have a lot of say in how we’re percieved and what stories will be created to explain our existence.