Beyond
six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no
one, having seen it, can forget. But not because , like other
memorable cities, it leaves an 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 or 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 which 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 rememberred, Zora
has languished, disintegrated, disappeared. The earth has
forgotten her.
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