Creative Thinking: Invisible Cities

上週的創意思考課作業，是閱讀四段摘錄自伊塔羅卡爾維諾【看不見的城市】的章節，然後選一個城市，創作一個比喻此城市的視覺作品。

這幅畫是我根據"城市與記憶之四：左拉"這個章節所畫的。今天我們把作品帶到課堂上，然後讓同學猜每個人所表現的是哪一座城市。

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This is the illustration I did for Creative Thinking class. We had to read four paragraphs of excerpt from Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino, then picked one city we like and make an imagery to represent this city. I picked "Zora", based on this following excerpt, which was translated from Italian.

Cities and Memory 4 - Zora

Beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forgot. But not because, like other memorable cities, it leaves ab unusual image in your recollections. Zora has the quality of remaining in your memory point by point, in its succession of streets, of houses along the streets, and of doors and windows in the houses, though nothing in them possesses a special beauty of rarity. Zora's secret lies in the way your gaze runs over patterns following one another as in a musical score where not a note can be altered or displaced. The man who knows by heart how Zora  is made, if he is unable to sleep at night, can imagine he is walking along the streets and he remembers the order by which the copper clock follows the barber's striped awning, then the fountain with the nine jets, the astronomer's glass tower, the melon vendor's kiosk, the statue of the hermit and the lion, the Turkish bath, the cafe at the corner, the alley that leads to the harbor. This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember: names of famous men, virtues, numbers, vegetable and mineral classifications, dates of battles, constellations, parts of speech. Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. So the world's most learned men are those who have memorized Zora.

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.